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Akiva was about to take his left hand away, but he realized suddenly that a red mark where he was leaning would betray him. He finished the nine projections and began to write the first name. Already the pattern was dissolving in sweat.

The girl sat by her sister's head and mopped her face. "Lie quiet," she said. "You don't push till the pains are closer together." The woman shrieked. She clutched her belly, erasing the design. Akiva began again.

A neighbor came and someone let her in. When she saw the markings on the daughter she went away, saying it was not time. The father barred the doorway after her, pulling the heavy mats tightly together.

Akiva sat hunched between the girl on his right hand and the mother on his left, who was trying to bend the woman's knees as though birth was imminent. Had she given her daughter some herb to bring it on? He tried to work faster. The lines went awry.

"Pray!" he bellowed at the writhing woman. "Do as I told you!" Now when he moved his left hand away, he saw that he had made a mark, but he did not try to conceal it. The daughter suffered another pang, and screamed so loud and suddenly that the sister jumped, almost knocking Akiva into the fire. "Be careful!" he shouted.

The fire had not been fed since the mother stopped tending it. Akiva tossed in a handful of twigs for light to work by. He peered at the lines he had drawn, trying to remember where he had left off.

"It's coming. Raise her up," the mother said.

The girl lifted her sister's shoulders and braced them with her own. "I'll hold so you can push. Breathe deep. Fea, mother of life," she prompted.

At times the sick woman almost listened to her sister, but when the pains came back she always forgot. Noticing Akiva, she pushed his hands away.

"I can tie her wrists together," the mother offered.

"No! Calm her."

"I can't," the mother snapped.

The house grew darker and the lines of sweat-diluted ash harder to find against the woman's skin. Suddenly, after what seemed hours of whimpering punctuated by ever more frequent moans, the woman began to push. She kept silent now, eyes shut, fists clenched with effort. Akiva raced to finish the mandala, terrified lest the baby be born with horns and claws still on it.

The mother pushed on her daughter also, straining awkwardly. Akiva finished. A half-second later the old woman sprang away, saying, "That's the head." Soon she drew out a small grey, bloody mass trailing its cord. The baby's pate and fingers were smooth. It seemed dead at first, but then gave a squeaky cry.

Someone opened a window. Daylight softened the shadows. Akiva collapsed in the straw and the family let him rest. They seemed more human now, tired and anxious instead of desperate. He would stay here. No one had recognized him, no one would bother him much with questions if he simply put up a hut near the town and worked quietly, helping in the fields and fishing, teaching Neshar and his newborn friend. Questioned about the past, he might tell them he was a young widower. The girl would soon marry him, they dance at his wedding and he speak the ritual himself at the true altar of life. He would grow old here in peace and quiet, loved by these men and women, with grandchildren trailing his steps as he had tagged after Shurat, die quiet in mind and in sight of Ayekar.

It was evening. Neighbors who hadn't expected the child to live had managed to scare up some presents and begun arriving at the hut, when they heard the sound of a horse on the roadway. Children ran to investigate, were called back and sent home while grownups hurried to places where they could watch from the forest. The birthing gifts, mostly honeyed fruit and some meat and beer, vanished. "Maybe we should stash all the food, just to be on the safe side," a woman suggested. "Did you hear what they did up mountains? Just this spring. Went back and collected again. Taxes."

"In springtime!" someone affirmed.

Another committee set out for the road and came back shouting excitedly, "Look out! Look out! They're coming this way!"

"They? How many are there?" Everyone ran to the windows.

A single horse scrambled up the path to the village, circled grandly and stopped in front of the door where the new grandmother stood. "I'll be plowed and planted," Akiva heard her say. "I'll be harrowed and sowed."

He went to the window. Everyone in the village was clustered as close together as they could stand around a shiny brown gelding that dripped sweat, rubbing it down with their sleeves, stroking its head and neck, untangling the hairs of its tail one at a time. Every snort and stamp brought murmurs of appreciation from the crowd. They also fingered the saddle, bridle and stirrups, thick leather jointed with bolts of steel.

On top of the horse sat a little weather-beaten woman, wrinkled and dark from years of exposure, but wearing a fine woven coat of heavy wool with a broad marroon stripe at the waist and a bright scarlet cord on her arm. When she jumped down, he saw that her leather boots reached to the knee. "It's a good horse, isn't it?" she asked the crowd. "My captain lent it to me. It needs water."

A dozen people volunteered. Others ran to find it some oats. Now they began to look at the rider. They fingered the hem of her coat and hitched it up to look at her boots. "Have you seen Pahid?" someone asked. So this was the midwife.

"Sure. I'm a regular soldier. Watch." She drew a thin polished knife and tossed it casually at a peg a few paces away. It hit the peg's center, quivered and stuck. "Just takes practice." She waited for the excitement to die down and someone to fetch her knife before she turned to the new grandmother. "I'm on a mission from him now, as a matter of fact, but I heard your girl was at her time so I thought I'd stop in."

"Too late."

"Too late?" It was the disappointment of someone who had expected a birthing fee. "It can't be too late. What do you mean? Is it dead?" She entered the house. "There you are--oh. Born so tiny. You forced it."

The mother was sound asleep, the baby nursing. When the midwife sat down she opened her eyes for a moment to say, "Ma Syrie. You came."

"Of course I came." She looked around. Akiva signed Neshar to bring her a dish of sweet fruit, and she bolted the food. The second daughter handed her some porridge. She made herself eat that more slowly. "They outfit us grand, but Pahid's tight as a noose with money, and my captain never crosses him."

"What's it like there?"

"Stay home. You wouldn't like it. We sleep afield half the time and the food as I say's irregular. Spend nights riding horseback hither and yon, and have to march in the morning. It's hard work. He's tougher than gristle. Gave me a day's ration and said, Go find the Akivites. And I went, too. We're all like that. Whatever he tells you, do. If he told me to lie naked in the snow and feel warm, then I'd do it. And the captain. Berthe. She's a giant woman, bigger than most of the men are, with long red hair, a real beauty, and nobody's fool. It takes wits to stay living, that close to Pahid." She noticed Akiva. "What are you looking at?"

He had moved to the front of the crowd and was now glaring at her in apparent fury. "Where is she?" he asked.

"With Pahid, on the way to the Middle Plains."

He picked up Neshar and went out. A few steps took him beyond the village. Both moons were bright in opposite parts of the sky. He threw shadows in two directions, northeast and southeast. A few days' walk northwest would bring him to the Middle Plains, to fighting against earth on the side of the dark temples and blood-stained altarstones. He knelt and prayed to Hath.

"He has won her truly." Ma Syrie stood behind him. "I know."

"We're on the priests' side now. The Lir Temple is fighting with us to save our goddess. Look what happened in Itscriye. They'll do the same everywhere we don't appease them."

"Who?"

"They speak to him, face to face."

Akiva studied her. Double moonlight vieled the woman in fine shadows. Light gathered in the centers of her deep-set eyes shone there when she looked up, then went out. All reflected. He knew she cherished Pahid's strength and the illusion of power it gave her. This woman would follow the evil one himself for the promise to rule his darkest nether chamber, or even for nothing, for the horror such a gift would attach to her name. "Why are you so worried about opinion, when you know your own self to be boundless?" he asked.

She shrugged.

They stood watching the wind eddies in the grass below. Ma Syrie bowed her head. "It's been so long," she muttered.

"But at last it is now!" he whispered in reply. Each turned slightly away from the other. There was a longer silence.

"How many are you?" she asked at last. He said nothing. "Will you really destroy the temple?"

"The buildings in the cities will all be destroyed in time, but the temple is here."

"Shall I tell him that?"

"Tell her."

Ma Syrie walked back to the hut where the whole village was gathered, singing and talking around a bright fire. Silence fell at her entry.

It was just sunrise when he came to the city pond. Ducks made black wakes as they streaked off the silver water. Tiyar waited for him on the opposite shore. He looked as though he, too, had been awake all night. "I'm glad to see you," he said. "I was afraid you would not come back."

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

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INDEX