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"What if a god said to you: I require you to do great evil in your lifetime and afterward be punished in recompense to your victims, and perhaps the god would compel you to kill your own children, or abandon them, or kill your father, perhaps--must you do this in obedience to divine command?" Tiyar asked.

Akiva was tying a bunch of rattles around his ankle. While he stooped to do that, a girl fastened a rope of flowers around his waist. He was covered wrist-deep with flowers and berries of every description, sweating in the cold predawn breeze as though he wore armor, vines and red blossoms woven into his braided hair, hands and face still smeared with the mud in which the flower-bringers had found him.

He started as though Tiyar were threatening him. Muddy sweat pooled under his eyes. "Divine command to do evil? You believe in evil that brings about good. Good is also needed to bring about good."

"But the evil is required of you. The god commands: kill your father."

"Abandon your children. Kill your father. Not long ago, I helped birth a child who was possessed in the mother's womb. The birth was so hard that the mother's mother told me to press down on the woman and crush the child."

"Did you do it?"

Clark, eavesdropping, thought the question surprised Akiva.

"No, I didn't. The child was born alive. But the grandmother said: no one will stop you."

"Yes."

Akiva crouched back a little so the flowers screened his face. Two moons illuminated them and the dozens of people running back and forth with flowers, cords and interlaced branches. "If you spoke now, Tiyar, your voice would travel through the whole world with nothing to stop it."

"This is no answer! What if you must do evil?"

"We propitiate the gods to make sure that will not happen." Akiva stood up, creating a little blizzard of flowers. "Besides, it is far rarer that we are commanded to do evil than that we cannot bring ourselves to do good, isn't it?" He shrugged, making another flurry of petals, and went to begin his dance. "Abandon children, kill father," Clark heard him mutter.

We cannot bring ourselves to do good, Clark thought. Well, suicide is extreme. Maybe I'll get another chance tomorrow.

When the dancing stopped, the odd sigh in the wind came to him again, the same noise he had heard on the bridge. "Paula, doesn't the wind sound strange to you?" he asked.

She looked up from her hands, and he realized she had been contemplating them all evening. "No. Yes, it does. It sounds sad. Maybe it has to do with the two..." She raised her hands toward the moons

as though she'd forgotton what to call them. "Coming together. These things are rare events. Once in about ten years, usually." She translated this for the herbalist's daughter, who sat beside her.

"It is a long, long time between them, isn't it, most times?" the daughter agreed in a low voice roughened by crying. "Why do they come so often these days? Only last year there was one, and my mother said..." Very distant drumming, almost like heartbeats, now reached them. Of course they were dancing in many places tonight.

Klyne sat down a little behind Clark and leaned forward. "My sons say Father Pahid is dancing near here. Would you like to see him, too?"

"The boys?" Clark jumped up. "Where? How could you let them go there?"

"Please relax," Tiyar commanded impatiently. "Strangers are welcome at the ceremony. What concerns me, however, is that they have selected our chosen battle-ground for the celebration."

"Have you been there with the kids?" Clark asked.

"No. Paula and I deposited watching eyes there yesterday." He handed Clark the receiver.

Instead of flowers and seed pods, Pahid wore ribbons and embroidered cloths and long cords of silver bells that gleamed like water. He danced slowly, stamping to make the bells ring and striking a drum he carried, and now and then he leapt straight up as high as his waist. When he looked at the triple ring of children who sat watching, they shuddered.

Of his own people, half were paying attention while the others wandered around the woods, drank and held horse races in the roadway. There were about thirty horses and perhaps three hundred adults, evenly divided between men and women, as far as Clark could see. But maybe the distribution of women favored Pahid, while more of the men were off drinking in the halflight, or again some of the women might have stayed back at the camp--he shook his head to clear it. "What do we do?" he asked.

"Wait," Tiyar said.

Klyne had already set off. Clark followed with some other parents, an oddly merry little contingent, all of them singing so as to attract no notice at the celebration. They arrived in time to see Pahid end his dance with a leap, heavy clothing and all, over someone's head. His followers cheered.

Next came a long sermon damning the ungrateful who failed to appreciate the temple, extolling the few and good who upheld it, promising to deliver the upright householders. So he would murder the homeless. He warned against strange magic seeds that sprang up quickly and yielded a fat harvest but nourished neither human beings nor gods. "When the stranger comes with the wonderful promises, the easy crops with no work, easy faith with no sins and no sacrifices, shut him out. Keep the bad seed out of the good old dirt. You've got to turn blind and deaf to it," he told them. The children had almost gone to sleep when he got to the horrors of divine retribution

"There'll be no help, there'll be no hope, there'll be no rescue. You'll feel the worm in your bones, you'll see him eat your eyes..." It was awful. It reminded Clark of Tiyar's stories about the Pravelany Temple in Merced.

The children had begun sobbing with guilt and terror long before Pahid got to the part about how a bad child could lead mother and father to damnation. Soon they were completely beside themselves, some rolling in the dirt while others lay on their sides with their knees drawn up and hands pressed to their ears. He switched tactics and started talking about Fea and how the priests knew special ways to draw her favor and protect children from angry gods. The children were more or less soothed when he finished, but as soon as he dismissed them they raced to their parents and urged them away. Pahid mounted his horse. He rode out with half a dozen others the same way they had come in.

Clark could follow and shoot Pahid, or for that matter the group of them, with his Puro. He was tempted, longer and more strongly than he ever dared admit, but the whole province would surely be devastated worse than Itscriye for his crime and the Armies of Daybreak gain little or nothing.

As he reflected, he was following. They were poor horses, easy to keep up with, but he was following in the woods in near darkness while they had the road in the grey before dawn, and by the time he convinced himself to put away his Puro, they were out of sight. The dust of the empty road, reflecting a twilit sky, looked so bright and smooth that he decided to chance walking back that way. Turning east, Clark began thinking about the boy with worms in his heart. He ran through everything he knew about parasites, their structures and systems, the human heart and all the drugs he could think of that might affect them, but came up with nothing they had on hand that would drive out the worms and not harm the weakened patient. If he could have gone Reshebora--but the world was poor.

A horn sounded ahead of him. Someone had given the alarm. Clark began to run.

Horses galloped toward him from behind. Clark ran faster and for a long time he led them. At last he saw a culvert and leapt into it. The horses clopped by, keeping near the ground as though afraid they would fall. Low-gravity gait, he thought. At home, people who kept horses laughed at the Eyimalian breeds, but here they were, equus Eyimalia, probably raised by the Viyatos in the Outland.

Now that the sun was up, he could see the riders' faces. First to pass was one of the biggest women he had seen on Paffir Haretz. She stopped not far beyond him and turned back, allowing two skinny men to pass.

Like the rest, she wore a leather cap, padded with straw, that provided a nest for mites and dripped tanning fluid when wet but could not have protected her from even the worst-aimed blow. Her leather tunic looked a little more useful; it could prevent abrasions if she fell. Though not a uniform that could make a brave warrior of a coward, it seemed forbidding on her because she looked so tough. Her hands and feet were bare, but so hard that she might as well have been gloved and booted. The size of her knife and spear attested to her strength. She pulled off her cap, letting down a blanket of red hair that sparkled like new mail, and looked around. The tranquility of her expression chilled him. It was the gaze of an intelligent fanatic. Pahid, who came up beside her, looked hard and bleak, a man who would be no more miserable in hell than in heaven.

Shoot them? He knew he couldn't. Yet he should prevent them from reaching the battleground. He could shoot their horses. Tiyar had been telling him for weeks that they had better not use modern weapons, becuase the Viyato were watching Pahid. Cursing silently, he took out his slingshot. So far he had practiced only on rodents and his record with them was terrible. A stick lay in the culvert. He drew it closer.

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

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