Click ~*~ to follow a thread.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Nobody bothered to look up any more. Passing from the front of the line, he entered anonymity. At the front they followed him, but already as the first few passed Akiva became an obstacle, a lump in the dust. Now and then somone turned around, then backed away with a nod and a surprised smile. The stretcher went past. He walked beside Fuego, telling the woman's story.

Rarely did Feugo understand all that was said to him. He thought a moment and asked somewhat timidly, "Who brings rain?"

"Hath sends rain."

"But Hath is good."

"You mean, why are there floods? You've forgotten, Fuego. They offended the temple."

"I forgot. But suppose--" Fuego smiled, that was an expression he had picked up from Neshar. "Suppose bad gods also brought rain. Suppose they brought rain at a time when you needed it. Would you--?"

"Owe them reverence? No."

"All right." Fuego nodded cheerfully. He was easy to talk to, even in front of Tiyar. There was never any need to guess what he was thinking, nor was he continually falling on his knees whenever Akiva told him something new. And yet he believed. When Akiva spoke of gods, he showed neither false reverence nor embarassment, but understanding.

Fuego bowed his head again. Drops of sweat pattered on Tiyar's feet. "Gods do not die."

"No."

"Can they eat?"

"You mean the tax," Akiva said. "I don't know what use they have for gifts, since they are perfect. Giving ennobles, and that may be all they value. But though free of starvation, they can eat. We are human. For us, a pleasure comes with pain. For them, it is pure. For us, eat and starve. For them, eat. That is godhood."

"A tax is not given. It is taken."

"This should be given."

"Only when there is enough?"

Akiva shuddered very slightly. "Yes, freely given."

"You believe!" Fuego laughed. He pulled at Tiyar's feet and the two exchanged words in their sibillant language, hissing and frowning like puzzled babies. I have been tested, Akiva thought, as Fatayad tests earth each winter. In spring people brought the first shoots to his altar, saying, "Love has taken root."

Fuego had asked him these questions for Tiyar's benefit. The answers could not have been in doubt. Only a low priest, much abused and seeking comfort in legal certainties, would insist on collecting taxes from a needy peasant. And yet nearly all of them behaved so. "Freely given," he repeated. A dust dervish threw the glittering cloud high and let it fall.

Hours before they reached the city they could see it from the top of a ridge, a lump of red clay partly obscured by ragged windbreaks. Part of the wall had evidently slid over winters and summers into a broad pond between the city and temple. In another generation, that would fall in also. Move the building? Dredge the pond? The Council must debate it hotly at each meeting, but neither would be done and when the building was submersed they would build another. Two or three probably lay at the bottom.

When they were almost there, Akiva left the road to climb a hill. He saw new foundations laid just behind the old temple, with cornerposts dug deep, below the waterline, and the mud dragged off over a greyish path to the water. So religion was at work and when the temple succumbed a new one would be ready, each building a stone or splinter better than the last, like the world and her people. Yes, the woman had advised him correctly. He would go and cast himself at the feet of the Lir Temple priest and ask protection. Pahid is the flower of history, and if his mercy is not yet perfect, Akiva thought, I will make it stronger.

The sun was setting, but the day still hot when they arrived, the cloud of dust still following. It was pleasant to bathe in the blue-green pond fringed at one side with cat-tails and white waterblooms slowly closing. Other people were arriving, too, by the dozens, from beyond the city and from the north and south, some on the road by which the Verloringers had come. City people were climbing their walls to see. Bright yellow points danced among the gold and red of the little waves and the steel-grey troughs between them, as they had every cloudless evening for endless ages and would, perhaps, forever. Unchanging, you are changing ever, Akiva prayed.

Children were playing games behind him. Stones clicked together and fell in the grass. "Babyface, babyface, make us cry. Your papa set you free and your mama let you die," one sang, and others taunted, "Crybaby!" Cookfires were struck up all round the pond. The declining sun drew the yellow points in the pond into a shining band across the water.

"The world is your favorite goddess, isn't she?" Fuego asked.

"Is she yours?"

"She is dead..."

Akiva turned to look at Fuego. He was staring at the scintillating water. "We come from a place that was destroyed and broken apart a thousand years ago, into a new world, a harsh one. Our religion is magic. We worship power--not strength; we are not cruel. Even babies and wasters have power. But to us, love is mourning for the place we destroyed. People call it Dead Mama."

"For you, love is sorrow..." Akiva was remembering the conversation between Fuego and the wandering priests Tiyar had killed. Fuego had told him of asking, where do you come from, and the woman's reply, Dead Mama, just like you.

"Not any more," Fuego answered. "Akiva, these people say you are Verloring, but I know you are not a god."

Tiyar approached. He and Fuego hissed at one another in their language. Akiva could see that Tiyar had told Fuego to ask what he, Akiva, would say that night, and Fuego had not done it. He would have had no answer, anyhow.

The torch they carried into the temple choked in the heavy air and gave so little light that the Eyimalians would have fallen over the altarstones had not Akiva stopped them. Fuego, standing at Tiyar's elbow, lit a second torch. Akiva saw him recoil. Black water ran between the floorstones. The place had a moldy smell shot through with incense and blood from the altars, decaying garbage, and urine from the doorway.

Tiyar bumped into a pillar. "That is Verloring," Akiva said. "His friend is Ather, who betrays him. Behind you, he dreads the battle to come."

"Why?"

"He knows he will be taken prisoner and held until he is freed by the infant Fey."

"How is the infant to free him?" Tiyar asked. He was thinking of his leader, Sevit.

"Easy," Fuego said. "Like Neshar."

"Yes, easy, old man, as it was for Luz. Except that your demons and captors were only your own stupidity," Tiyar said blandly in high Paffir. He wandered to the next pillar.

Weak torchlight drifted around the temple, past Fea, past Hath, past the daughters of Winter hiding the infant Spring. The light revealed Hath with his net, knife and fire. This Hath looked like a fisherman stepping over fetid waves, eyes black as a fish's.

"I was priest in a temple," Akiva remarked.

Tiyar stopped. "When?"

"I was raised to it. By a folkpriest."

"And what happened?"

Tiyar scrutinized him so closely that Akiva skipped over the easier story of Berthe--how it happened he was no longer a priest--and told about Shurat. "It was as though a fish jumped out of the water and was caught in the air. The other fish see only the air's surface, and never know where he went," he concluded.

"Do you mean he vanished?" Tiyar demanded.

"He went out of his mind all at once, while preaching."

Tiyar said nothing.

"He dithered, in front of all the people. And later he died."

Akiva moved out of Fuego's torchlight.

"He might have lived, though, had you acted differently?" Tiyar suggested quietly.

"Yes." The cloud of light approached him; he moved away, accidentally touching Hath. Black ooze seeped through his tunic.

Fuego saw blood on a stone. "Akiva, let's go. This isn't a good place," he said.

"I had hoped to pray here, but there are no gods here," Akiva said. He picked up Hath's prayer bell, sharply, so the clapper struck, but before it could ring he muffled it with his hand. Even the desire has left me, he thought. He dropped the bell onto the stone.

Fuego took his arm. "Come outside. Outside you will feel--This is a bad place."

The other giant was studying the pillar that showed Rani forcing Shis, hand of fate, to speak. Tiyar mirrored the god's expression, fascinated and afraid, seeing the future of mankind in Rani's eyes.

"What do they see?" Fuego asked him.

Shis sees horror, Rani despair, Akiva thought.

"You sleep but you will waken," Tiyar quoted. He followed them out. "There is Fea. Strength and fertility, old man. I feel that these people remember their history." He held out his hands and the torch to take in the whole building. "I feel it. This place is ready for what must happen. Let us go and speak."

Outside, a crowd was drinking, talking and eating around an enormous bonfire. More were waiting in the moonlight along the pond's edge, and others watched from the top of the city wall where they could see well but would not hear. Akiva was going to use the peasant dialect anyhow, which city people generally couldn't understand. Whatever he decided to say. He watched the people, women plumped down in the grass to pass jugs around, youngsters wolfing hot barley and roughhousing, all sorts gaping at Tiyar. A woman sat on a stone, with a baby at her left breast nursing by moonlight and a child on her right knee ruddy from the fire. He would speak to her. Two moons and five hundred willing hearts must find voice. There Clark stood, a comfortable distance from the fire, with Neshar. Why do we need fire, Akiva thought. Some day sun will warm us and earth will give food we can eat without fire. It was the vision of Earth burning and the memory of Shurat that made him afraid of fire--but if that were so, he would fear water. He did. Even on those mornings when he shivered with happiness, a part of his exaltation was fear. Standing in the light of two moons and realizing he feared water, Akiva saw two girls throw big jars of oil on the fire. The flames shot higher than the city.

People chanted, clapping time. Drums beat. He heard southern piping. They raised their arms, clapping overhead, and swayed from side to side with the weight of their hands like stalks of grass.

Akiva listened to the roar and the echoes, facing them, his back to the fire, until the chant faded to whispers. They can't see me, he thought.

"Hath beckons!" he shouted. The shout echoed.

They sat frozen.

"Who will go?"

Five hundred voices kept silent. This always frightened him, the massive silence sustained by collective will. He had to control that silence and make it serve his voice.

"Hath, our giving father, calls. Hath the father mourns and grieves. Fea weeps; her raining tears wear down the mountains to bare stone. Verloring is gone, gone--in the height of summer, hope is gone. The harvest yet in leaf is pledged to an empty temple, the child is in the bearing who will die of want this winter. Behold the perfection that is." He jerked his head toward the temple, and heard the people in front explain his motion to the ones behind, a quick rush of whispers that spread out in a ring beyond hearing.

"Who will go? Not one? Yes, they are far away, the gods. As far as son from father, as far as sister from sister, as far as between two lovers in darkness, as far from us as the length of a prayer, as far as we will not look, in their far heaven, their loneliness. They call us as silently as we refuse to hear, we the best and basest of their creatures. We only can love them with hearts that have voice, we only can wound our mother goddess with hands."

He walked almost into the front row to look at them. Eyes lowered. People looked at their hands, people studied the backs of those before them.

"Why do we do this? Why in the world beloved of the sun and washed by the shining Lir from the tears of the third moon, in this place where every hair of every feather on each tiny bird is perfect, why among these fields, the sun-glittering soft-shadowed clothing of our goddess, do we live in hells of vengence and despair? Why, beneath this sky and before those mountains, does the temple rot and stink of blood?"

They liked that. Some were cheering, some laughing, some throwing stones at the building. "We are children of earth, and earth, whatever they may say, is pure! Only look," he went on. Sweat dripped from his fingers. Pahid would have him carded--it was a primary tenet that earth had been sullied in the battle for Ayekar and the gods could not touch her except through the farmers. Yet not one peasant stood up to defend his importance.

The time for shouting passed. People sat down to listen and drink again. Akiva raised his hands. "Here is your priest, come to tell you about gods. What need I tell you? For those who see it, there is news of them everywhere. Summer warmth tells us their kindness, cold winter their sorrow. There are floods and droughts, storm and plagues and the priests and taxes. What do these things mean?" He paused, but kept his hands up.

"These are the voices that speak to those who do not fill their heads with senseless chanting. These are the scrolls that every man and woman can read, whereon is written the truth. Priests and scholars tell us nothing with their mouths. But only watch them. Watch when they come in the fall on their wagons, and let each one ask, what do they say with their hands. Only watch and listen. It is from the mouths of want-mad children you will hear the truth. We are betrayed!"

He stopped, and the slow, laboring silence covered them. Many leanded forward. They wanted to understand and were ready to believe. He smiled encouragingly.

"So you ask, how is this? How am I betrayed? Does earth not feed us? Do the priests who collect the tax not bless me in return? Make the sun shine and the rain fall?" He paused to look them over, turning his body from far right to far left, before he asked slowly, "Do they not feed the gods?"

Now it was too late. If he never spoke another intelligible word, the damage was done. He led them through confessions of every sin he could think of, from envy to murder, and a prayer for Verloring, and then he walked over to where Tiyar sat. Standing in front of him, Akiva yelled, "Now listen to a man who has spoken face to face with gods! Listen closely. Your children's children will ask you of this night." The Eyimalian rose up behind him like a shadow.

Tiyar raised his arms, palms inward, and let them drop. He might tell them anything he liked, but he could not tell them about the empty temple, because he had not felt it. Akiva saw him take a deep breath.

"The Lost God is among us. The lost one is male; the lost one is female. The lost one is new born; the lost one is older than the temple. Verloring may be found in any province, in any village, in any heart that longs for justice. We bring him an army that will rid the world of evil." He sat down.

That was all. The crowd shouted, chanted, rushed forward to embrace and kneel to them, becoming confused, stepping on one another's feet. Akiva performed about twenty naming ceremonies. Drums sounded again, with keening pipes, flutes and solemn dulcimers until all but the drunkest were dancing.

One moon illuminated the little stream that fed the pond. Akiva walked beside its gulch toward the moon and listened to the water. White ripples showed where the brook dropped over stones, splashed into pools between them or sprayed in white beads to another black pool below. This is her altar and bell, he thought.

Clark brought him Neshar. He tied the sling around Akiva's waist and shoulders while he talked. "The priests do give the taxes away, and they do get good weather in return. Not from gods, but--"

"What are you going to do tomorrow?"

"Show people how to grow potatoes."

"Nor do you deserve our prayers in return."

"No."

"So you understand. A god is not just a powerful being. A god is an embodiment of that which creates," Akiva said. Behind Clark, Fuego was beaming. His students repeated the conversation among themselves. When he had passed three or four comfortable hollows and they had all dropped away to bed down, he unslung Neshar and set him in the tall grass.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
CONTINUE.....................

Go to Chapter: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21
INDEX