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CHAPTER 15

Blows fell. People shouted and ran. Someone took her medicine bag. She was carried a short way on a horse, then pushed off. Someone covered her head and dragged her. Now it was dark, whether the same night or the next one she could not calculate. Feet shuffled around her. She tried to listen to the birds, but heard none. This was a town. She felt thirsty. Perhaps a long time had passed since her capture; her internal clock, once so accurate, had stopped.

They uncovered her head. A balding wiry preist squatted beside her. His gaze felt like a blast of hot wind.

"Now," he said in high Paffir. He was balancing himself with a knife, point in earth. "Now," he repeated.

Paula stared at the black sky, but the man's life-killing gaze made itself felt. Relaxing the muscles at the back of her neck, she tried to look calm. The priest gripped her jaw and yanked her face toward him. She relaxed her stomach. Now she wanted to live.

The priest smiled. "I think you know a good deal. I am a man of learning, too. We can bring one another light." He held up her medicine bag. "I have seen fluids and devices like these, in dreams." He touched his whiskers. "Say your name."

Paula chose, at random, a name she had heard often. "Berthe."

"I would be more surprised to learn that you are another Berthe than that you dare to lie. But I know nothing. Perhaps you want me to believe your forces are the mirror of mine, of the Temple's. That I won't. Let it stand, though." He grinned. "Of course, I could torture it out of some women, but you are reserved for more important work."

"You're right," Paula said. "You know nothing." She saw no harm in making him think her unafraid. He wants me to respect him, she thought. He wants to scare me into some gentlemen's agreement where I do what he wants. What did he mean about a mirror, mirror of the Temple's forces? Maybe he thinks we're demons.

Two skinny priests raised her to her feet, and one retied the rope around her ankles to leave slack enough for little steps. She had to mince along behind the bald one. Paula nearly faltered when she saw they were heading for the back door of a temple, but she resolved that so long as anyone could see her there would be no show of fear. She slowed her pace and, taking a deep breath, began to shout a revolutionary song Tiyar had translated into Paffir.

The crowd stopped milling. Everyone listened. The assistant priests gaped, shut their mouths and glared. The older one was smarter; he pretended not to notice. She had time to finish at a fine solemn tempo, "With one voice we cry no more," and walk through the door singing. The assistants hustled her down a flight of stairs.

They brought her to what looked like an unused cheeseroom illuminated by a torch set in an iron ring in the wall. Near the cieling, a thin window overlooked the gutter outside. The floor was covered with straw.

"We need a woman to search her," one of the younger men said in high Paffir. Their accent was almost like Tiyar's. The real thing, she thought, Lir Temple. This is how their gods, the Viyato, speak. Few religious tongues anywhere came so near.

"She's not going to poison herself tonight," the older one sneered. "And what's all the new straw for? Well, leave it here. Her bed is more comfortable than any of ours, but so be it."

Quit complaining, Paula thought. You don't have to show me how disorganized you are. But the hint about suicide bothered her, and she had to stare at the torch to keep from looking at the old man.

He was watching her. "What is your name!" he shouted suddenly.

"Berthe."

A kick in the knee toppled her.

"Your goddess?" the priest asked quietly.

"What?"

"Who is your goddess?"

"I don't have any."

He thrust the torch near her chin to study her. She felt like a child caught and dragged to the mirror to confront her liar's face. He turned around abruptly and went out, followed by his assistants, leaving Paula in darkness with her wrists still bound.

She examined the cell. Its floor was square, earthen, five paces on a side. Two clay walls opposed two stone ones she supposed were outer foundations. Three times she nearly tripped in holes at the corners, and each time she heard rats. They might be useful, she told herself firmly.

After a few minutes' effort, Paula was able to climb up three of the iron rings set in the wall. She guessed that with her hands free she could swing from the highest to kick someone coming in the door, or leap from the ring to the window. There was no hope of escaping that way, however, since the window was too small to squeeze her head through, even if she lost so much weight that her body would pass. She found two more rings near the floor. Might as well sleep, she thought. Huey had said a prisoner's best weapon was calm.

"You are very strong, almost free from the degeneration normally associated with heresy," the priest told her in the morning after a giantess, whose name really was Berthe, inspected Paula and retied her wrists. "Your strength is bad, for two reasons. First, I am going to please the gods by making you their supplicant. That won't be easy. Second, we need a nature in which the effects of godlessness are obvious."

The intent of this speech was to reduce her to gibbering terror. "You're a tough kid," Paula's father had told her once. She thought of him now and shrugged. The two assistant priests were building a small fire in the middle of the cell, their faces so alike in concentration that she wondered whether they were brothers. Fire. Would they--? But the mirror, the mirror. As she tried to think, the priest's comment about the mirror kept returning. Was it because of the woman whose name really was Berthe?

"My sons are going to drag you into the presence of the gods, and you will arrive in pliant spirit," the priest went on.

Paula rushed one of the sons, intending to break his nose with her head, but the other tripped her and threw her off balance, so that when the first one kicked her she fell. They tied her, wrist and ankle, to the wall, while the father blew on the flames.

Tiyar had told her a way of shutting her brain's channels to pain. She tried to do it, but at the first touch of the heat she screamed. Faces appeared at the window, some laughing, some wincing for her, all reddened because people had to stoop over to see.

"Don't be so childish," the priest said. He took a red ember in his own hand and clenched his fist. His expression did not change. He opened his hand. Skin and ember were black. He motioned to his sons to continue.

At first Paula thought of nothing. Later she tried to stop her screaming in order to hold something in reserve. Her body tensed so long that when they stopped and let her fall on the bed of straw her muscles were as sore as though she had been made to carry heavy weights for hours. She slept and woke in daytime. Berthe came to see her wounds.

"Is it morning or evening?" Paula asked.

Berthe shook her head. "Above all else, I must not tell you the time. We have stopped the temple bells for you."

"He's trying to drive me out of my mind." Paula held the other woman's sleeve and looked at her eyes. Confront, she told herself. Confront and confront and confront. "Are you going to help destroy me?"

"No. He said you are one for whom it is morning, but you believe it is night. We must tear you free from wrong thinking." Berthe rolled up Paula's sleeves to reveal burns from wrist to elbow.

Why did I have them covered, Paula thought. Already hiding wounds. "Is this for my own good, too?" she demanded.

"Where time is short, the remedy must be harsh. Have patience," the giantess pleaded. "Other souls than your own depend on this."

"What?"

"Little children are being reared so far from our gentle goddesses. We must reach them." She took up Paula's hands. "Only priests have skin as smooth as this. Everyone in the south will follow when they see these hands at prayer."

"Who says I'm going south? Who says I'm going to pray?"

"Father Pahid does."

A deep, lifeless chanting labored toward them in the hallway and then filled the room. Berthe withdrew. The priests came in. After some incomprehensible questions, they flailed at her with cords, chanting above her cries, trying to make her join voice with their inhuman song.

It was dark. The priests might have been there half an hour or all day; the time and the marks on her body ran together so she lost count of the things they had done. Soon her memory would confuse day and night until she knew only isolated moments of pain and peace. The word "torture" never entered her mind during her imprisonment.

Once, when a cold rain muddied the floor of her cell, she climbed on the rings to stay dry and saw Pahid standing some distance away in the vacant street, his arms raised as Akiva's had been by night in the forest long ago. He was still there when she fell asleep and tumbled down. The next time he visited her, his hands, usually blue, were purple.

At times her own strength exhilarated her. "You will fail!" she ranted at Pahid as his sons made up the fire. "Your boys will get tired of burning me, or I will die yelling the truth in your ears! When the downtrodden of this world throw off the weight of your temple, my words will triumph."

"Yes. We give you innocence, purity, suffering," Pahid answered grimly.

Occasionally she tried to make use of opportunities to question him. Once when he asked where she came from, she said, "From where giants live." It was dangerous. He didn't hit her, though. His curiosity was roused. He must know about Sevit. Had this face looked upon Sevit's? She could have loved him wholeheartedly.

"Where is that place?"

"South."

"What kind of giants?"

"They have yellow hair."

"Yellow? Not red, like his?" He pointed to one of his sons.

"No."

Pahid went on to other subjects. He could not have seen Sevit, whose hair was black as vac. But he had heard something. She was coming near. Suddenly she wondered if she were not loosing her mind after all, if he might not have told her where Sevit was, and she forgotten. No. She was coming near.

At other times she felt too miserable to think even about dying. Then she would sit or lie where they tossed her and nothing could make her weep.

"Woman, don't you see how many people are working to save you?" Father Pahid demanded when she was in a dejected mood. His face was pale and dry, though the room was hot and his sons perspiring. "No, you insist on pretending you suffer alone. But we will keep on. You will be dragged sulking and cursing all the long way to redemption, and only there, at the gates of Ayekar, will you see who are your true and loving friends."

Suddenly, Paula switched into anger. "You are tiny! You are nothing! Your religion is a joke!" She panted, then went on, merely shouting, "Use your common sense! What gods would be pleased with what you have done to me?" She glanced out the window to see whether the spectators were impressed, but it was night and they had gone home.

Pahid's sons were shocked, but he said only, "Untie her. The rest will wait until tomorrow. Today we will talk." He always referred to each visit as a day, even when he came at night. Paula suspected that he sometimes left and returned again or twice between sunrise and sunrise, but she could hardly tell the difference between an hour and a day any more. Time had gone out of control.

The sons went away. Paula sat on the heap of straw. Pahid stood.

"Your masters," Paula said. She wanted not to rest, but was too tired to frame a proper question.

"The fathers of the temple," Pahid said.

"This temple?"

"This building? No, of the whole. Do you think a local priest would dare tamper with magic as I have with you?"

"Where are they?" she persisted.

"The fathers? In a place. They come to me at the Lir Temple."

"Where the taxes go," Paula said. Her eyes closed of their own accord.

"Yes, that too. All communication between human beings and gods is through my masters."

"Gods? Thieves," Paula said. She opened her eyes. "The masters."

"Why are you preoccupied with theft? If we give them what they ask, the gods send favorable weather, health and such things. When we fail them, there is famine, disease and madness. If it is the food we give them that troubles you, be assured no human being could eat what my masters take away."

"Black dust?"

The priest waved his hand. "Yes, and you will say they have some use for it or that by some magic they restore it to edible form. What they do with it is of no interest. We give them all they ask. In return they protect us. They give us laws and the temple, without which you know full well we would subsist like beasts. There would be no rules to govern our dealings with one another and no one to stop us from doing wrong. What would that be but damnation?"

"Damnation," Paula exhoed stupidly. She wanted to make him see how inutterably tiny he was, by telling him how many worlds existed. How long did I sleep when he said it was night, she wondered.

"Damnation. Beyond the help of divinity. We would behave like beasts were we left to ourselves. You must have seen that."

Paula thought at once of Tiyar, but she objected, "People make laws to govern themselves."

The priest shook his head. "Not without help."

It seemed there was no arguing with that. She could say they did, he would say they didn't, until one of them died from old age. There must be some evidence. She was half-dreaming by now, and had to rally herself to answer, "But there are hundreds of different kinds of law. You can't say they all derive from the same gods."

The priest looked down at his hands. For some reason they were red today. "Hundreds of kinds of laws. Well...people who have lost sight of the gods sometimes try to make laws in imitation of what they remember. We saw that in Itscriye. Something like it existed among the herbalists, too. They had laws of their own. But the first law, the good law, comes from Ayekar."

Paula's eyes narrowed. She hated this man, his logic, the absurd temptation of his faith, the temptation to believe her suffering was more than chance. If I believe in his gods I will know I've lost my mind, she thought. "How do you know gods exist?" she asked.

He laughed. "How fearful she is! Thieves and tyrants under an empty heaven are all she believes. Of course I know there are gods, the same way anyone knows anything. I have seen them and spoken with them. Besides, there is hunger and so food exists. There is thirst, hence water. Weariness, hence sleep. And there is reverence, so there must be gods. From whom could we learn the idea of holiness, which everyone understands though few have ever seen it, if not from the gods?"

"That's what you say," Paula answered slowly, trying to keep her point clearly in mind. "You don't believe it. Because you don't believe it, you left an open window up there instead of putting me in a windowless room." She paused.

He waited.

"You wanted people to look in and judge you because you were afraid of what might happen if they didn't. You were afraid to rely on gods."

Pahid smiled. His head looked like a stone cleaving to present two sharp edges. "It helps to have a temporal reminder."

"You're just too honest for fire to scorch, aren't you?" Paula snapped. She jumped up, intending to seize the torch and kill him with it, but the blood rushed down from her head and she fainted.

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

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