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"You were saved," Berthe told her when she came to. The big woman carried out the wet straw under the window and brought in some wooden bowls, stopping now and then to speak. "Does your head hurt? You must eat. Before you fasted. That was because you were subduing a wicked body. But the gods love you now and so you must preserve yourself."

"I hate him," Paula groaned.

"No, no. He is the father of your soul now," Berthe said. She crumbled some herbs into a bowl of porridge.

"Father of my soul," Paula spat back. She flung the porridge at the wall. "I hate him! I have every reason to hate him!"

"No, he is your holy father," Berthe said patiently.

"I hate my father."

"Why? He acts only from love for you."

"He raped me," Paula said bitterly. She lay back in the straw.

"Pahid?"

"My father."

Berthe looked down. She thrust her medicine-stained hands into the straw to hide them. "Oh. That was bad, I think. He should not have done it, even though he is your father and can do as he likes. The gods do not allow it."

"There are no gods!" Paula shouted.

"Of course there are. Otherwise it would not be wrong to do as your father did."

"You're mad! You're out of your--driving me out of my mind! All of you," she panted, suddenly fatigued. "All of you are making me lose my mind. Stop. Please, use your common sense."

"It is of no use in the contemplation of Ayekar. Faith alone can guide us," Berthe said.

Paula closed her eyes. She imagined herself walking in the hot sun beside a quarry. Far away at the bottom of the pit she saw Clark chained to a stone, trying to call her.

"Don't be sad. You should be happy now because your soul is free," Berthe said.

Who is this, Paula thought. She asked the first personal question that came to mind. "Where were you born?"

"I was born in Nichayu."

"Are you married?"

"Yes."

"Does he treat you well?"

Berthe smiled involuntarily and blushed. "I am bigger than he is."

"Nichayu," Paula mused. Berthe wriggled uncomfortably, but she was not deterred. "I know that name."

"Have you been there? Is the crop good?"

"No, I haven't. Akiva didn't want to go there."

"Oh," Berthe said faintly.

"How did you get to be a Defender of Faith?"

"I was the biggest and most religious woman in my village. I was the only one who understood the church language," Berthe said. "When Father Pahid came to my village, he chose me."

"How did you know the temple language?"

"From going there. Some learn, others do not."

Paula closed her eyes. "It's bright in here."

"Fever. We will let you sleep."

"This is madness," Paula whispered.

"Sleep and get well. They need you in the south."

"My eyes...are you the same Berthe that Akiva remembers?"

"Yes."

* *

The mountains south of the Middle Plains rose from a wide marsh that absorbed its brooks and streams and rivers and transformed them into a superabundance of cat-tails and mosquitoes. As elsewhere on Paffir Haretz, the tax road through the Middle Plains followed the rivers, into the marsh and through it to the Lir. In spring the rain-loosened topsoil clouded the water and in fall the best of the harvest came away on wagons, so a common expression for crushed hopes was, "gone the way of the good dirt."

Here, near the roadway, the Daybreakers camped. By night Tiyar trained them, by day they gathered fish and edible grass. Akiva taught his students to build boats and lectured the Itscriyites on the realms of air and water, comparing the two to conscious thought and meditations of the soul. During his year as a wanderer he had lived once with a fisherman on the eastern coast, kneeling for hours in the prow of a canoe while he stared through the water's surface to the depths, spear ready, and thought of the fisherpeople's gods. The sound of water lapping the boat returned him now to the peace of those days, so tranquil that he feared to confess to anyone how much he loved them. Dreams ripened the very air of this voluptuous marshland, the life-oozing delta of the Middle Plains where earth and the outcasts of humankind would beget their paradise.

Within a week, though, the edible grasses thinned. Harmony between the Itscriyites and the Verloringers likewise withered. Some Verloringers went north to beg in the wealthy Plains, and Itscriyites followed them to steal. Tiyar and Akiva campaigned against banditry. Fuego searched his archives for recipies to cook insects. Clark planted special varieties of potato on the rocky hillsides.

One afternoon, Clark and Fuego sat tying nets while Akiva's students discoursed about theft. They pursued ownership through some tricky parables: a farmer grew a crop from stolen seed; a farmer planted his own on another family's land; a farmer reared a pig on stolen fodder; a farmer nourished himself with stolen food. There was no particular decision on any case. Akiva broke in to talk about seeds once, and matched wits occasionally with the disputants. On the question of the pig, he asked how many children each farmer had.

"None. That is, neither of them is real," the student answered.

"You see? We make law. Gods make worlds. That's why they laugh at law."

Fuego leaned forward. "Gods laugh at law?"

"Every human being is a separate, sacred law. Isn't that so? These laws of ours are like dolls."

"And we--" Fuego began, still leaning forward, earnest and hopeful. The question of how they would eat was now to be decided. "And we--"

But at that moment, the boy with worms in his heart made his way into the tent and laid his head in Akiva's lap. His thin hands, uable to support their own weight, made faint prayer gestures. A worm crawled down the inside of his leg. "Fea, my darling, I'm ready," he murmured.

Akiva turned to Clark. His hair brushed audibly across his shoulder and fell, black and straight, his black eyes bright with life looking out over a small face the color of a dead moon. Clark remembered the look of calm inquiry as a bitter reproach.

"He's dying. He has worms all through his body, and I don't know how to kill them without his dying, too," Clark said.

"I will sing them out," Akiva said. "Lie down, boy. Don't be afraid. Think of your goddess, think of your soul's mother."

All night he sat at the boy's head and sang a chant that consisted of the word, "Go." While Clark waited to see whether anything would happen, he drifted between waking and sleeping, contemplating the command Go. All of us go without wondering that we go, he thought. How strange. We might as well do nothing and die right away as do something and die later, but all things that live heed the command. Go, catch light and make food from it, bloom and seed and thrive. Go, divide and hatch and be born, swim and crawl and walk and fly. Go and eat and live, gather and hunt and nest and spawn. The leaf, feeling nothing, moves into the light. The blind cell, understanding nothing, surrounds its prey. The new bird pecks at the wall of the universe until it shatters. From this feeding and multiplying spring up purposes as distantly removed as research into the working of an antibiotic or travel to Paffir Haretz for the sake of friendship and love.

He heard the students fall asleep one by one and curl up in their places, come to, rise and go away to their sleeping huts in the trees. Only he and Fuego remained. Nothing happened for hours, while Akiva chanted in a low even voice, lulling the boy's heart to near death in the most gentle and drastic of treatments.

Clark dozed for a moment and dreamed that he saw Paula, far away, looking at him with an expression of pity because his arms and legs were chained. When he woke, the morning light was almost strong enough to show color.

Worms began to leave the boy's body through various ways, bringing with them so much blood that the child, now naked, was soon covered in it. Clark thought he saw worms emerge through the skin. He had seen parasites exit the dying before, but the sight still horrified him every time, and this exodus was worse than most. Fuego had also seen it before, and had helped Luz collect the worms and destroy them, but he looked sick now, too.

Clark decided to help cool the patient by bathing him with water, so he went out to fill a jar at one of the streams that ran everywhere in the camp. He saw Tiyar practicing marksmanship on the other side. Insects, butterflies and birds died in the air all around him. Branches snapped, scattering green leaves over the dead creatures. Clark heard Tiyar step across the water and approach, but he filled his jar quickly, sinking it with a plash in the icy current, and went back to the tent.

Fuego sat in the entry, still trembling. "They stopped," he said.

"Is the boy alive?"

"His heart's beating. Sorry to be so squeamish."

Akiva came out behind Fuego, patted his shoulder in answer and extended his hand, saying, "Come sit by the fire until the sweat dries. The cure comes close to death, doesn't it, Clarek? I told you, gods laugh at our law."

"Close to death," Clark agreed, looking around at the stream and thinking of rivers and roads and the command, Go. The boy's life perched itself in the tiny space between the illusion of death and death as did theirs between starvation and Pahid and, for that matter, all life between beginning and end, pressed each to the surface of its island in night. Vac-tremors again. He sneezed.

Both he and Fuego sat absorbed in thinking about the cure and kept silent when Tiyar came to demand a solution to the food question, as though their failure to provide one showed that he had been right all along. Both looked at Akiva. The answer came again and seemed obvious now, while they were thinking of life sustained in the gap between simulation and actuality, and of a cure that might prove fatal. So it would be if they robbed the tax wagons, sustaining the Temple's destroyers with its tithes at risk of becoming bandits themselves.

They agreed. The Itscriyites would have done it in any case, with bloodshed, and pillaged the Middle Plains as well. Better to rob the enemy than prey on their friends. Besides, the single road led south from the Plains through the marsh. It would be simple.

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

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