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Everyone trusted Berthe. Paula had at first noticed this with surprise and alarm, but now she felt quite definitely annoyed. Reaching past Fuego to grab the jar, she said in Eyimalian, "Watch out."

"She walked here by herself," Berthe said.

Paula interjected, still in Eyimalian, "Listen, I think Sevit's in the capital." She had been saying that all day without being able to rouse any enthusiasm, but at least it might get Fuego off the subject. None of her friends seemed able to get it through their heads that Berthe loved Pahid, that she was his special find and best student, that he had tested her severely and murdered her dear friend and still she followed him. It was for her sake that many herbalists, who loathed Pahid, wore the red cord.

It was for their sake, Berthe claimed, that she opposed rebellion. She had complained before of how, accustomed to fear and jealousy and threats from everyone around them, they refused to see their danger. Despite their educated airs, the group had no real wealth. At tax time they ran to the forests to hide, and called anyone who did otherwise an idiot, but most of these sturdy independents lived on gifts from their patients, and in spring when the peasants were hungry they, too, had to stay the pangs with mad-dog weed.

And for all the denouncing, priests tolerated herbal medicine except for the very occasional purge. The women lived by the Temple's sufferance on the peripheries of faith. "If he sends priests into the villages with amulets and spirit dolls and commands the people to forsake my women, no red cords will save us. The people will hunt us like deer, like winter wolves," Berthe had once remarked. She must also keep in mind a second following. Eighty-seven female zealots known as Defenders of Faith called Berthe their captain and mother.

"Yes, you think Sevit is in the capital," Tiyar answered in Eyimalian. "But what do you know? Only that you think Pahid once heard of someone like him. He accepted your description of Sevit as blond. Therefore he has not seen him. We deduce--"

"Remember the six Outlanders," Clark said, also in Eyimalian. Everyone looked at him. Paula bowed her head. She must not fail to win Berthe, or she would some day kill her. Clark went on, "They said someone they knew had seen him once, at the Ketry landing field. That's near the capital."

"Had seen him once!" Tiyar repeated. "We do not know where he is. If we tip our hand, the three families will crush us, whereas if we continue as we are doing, we will break their grip on Paffir Haretz forever. Only wait until the rivers are full in spring. When this swampland floods, our people will be ready to scatter as from a bursting pod--"

"Let's send scouts to the capital. Trading parties. Herbalists. Paula and I can go. No one would notice us," Clark said.

Jars were being collected. Verloringer children swept the floor. More dough was kneaded to make the biscuits they would eat after they had practiced fighting by moonlight. Akiva came in and someone offered him a plate of food but he refused it.

"Hypocrite, you seek danger to salve your aristocratic conscience," Tiyar snapped. Fuego laid a hand on his arm, but he brushed it away. "For you to make your purpose known in the capital would be fatal not only to you but to our city here. We cannot use the same technique to free Sevit that you did to free Paula, because he is kept by people who know his value." Akiva sat down with them. Fuego translated for him, though Tiyar shook his head in protest.

"We did not free Pa'ula," Akiva said. His hair and tunic were drenched, his eyes glazed. He looked like a river god, or a ghost.

"Who freed her?" Fuego asked softly.

"Pahid."

Berthe sat with her hands in her lap, her head down so her hair obscured her face. Orange strands covered her big fists like a blanket. As she gazed at those fists they shifted slightly and nestled into her stomach. "It was with his consent," she said.

Vanity, pride, Clark thought. So much for being heroes. Raising his eyes, he met Krup's. The road slave, the convert, the spy, whatever he was, he winked.

Krup took to following Berthe and Paula around the camp. Though he was supposed to be busy making footbridges, the two women saw him idling everywhere. When Paula built a spinning wheel according to Berthe's directions, he watched her bind sticks together, and when she took it it the drafty hut they called the cloth room to show the weavers, he was sitting among them. Though he seldom spoke to her, he stared so avidly at Paula that the Plains woman to whom he had been something more than a steady customer took offense and deserted the city. Once Paula asked how the bridges were doing. He interlaced his fingers and leered, "Just fine."

She put up with him because the project of the moment was brotherhood. Fuego and Tiyar had allowed the Verloringers and Itscriyites to work and live separately, but she integrated them. She found out the ringleaders of the various subgroups and cliques, and put them to work together. The scouting party they finally sent to the capital was made up of an Itscriyite and two of Akiva's students. The most popular Itscriyite woodworker found herself building rafts with a Verloringer patriarch. Itscriyites and Verloringers worked cheek by jowl at the looms and actually passed the shuttle without dropping it often, sometimes in a steady rythm and even to song. Youngsters from both sides pounded bark to split out the tough fibers for winter matting and overcoats, and though the first few "accidents" resulted in fights at the stream where Augenblau and an Itscriyite girl soaked the bark, Paula made them stay together until suspicion gave way for lack of evidence.

It seemed that she alone grasped the secret: most of the Verloringers came from Itscriye and most of the Itscriyites privately loved Akiva. When opponents played implacable, she would ask, "What's the matter, are you two from the same town?" and they backed off, because likely as not they were. She explained the secret to Fuego and Tiyar, but they kept on trying to reason through arguments, and getting caught in tangles of who did what first to whom. What little time she had slept before was now given over to love, but instead of tiring she seemed to have found strength at an infinitely renewable source, and the peace that suffused her seemed to dazzle and halt the most bitter antagonists.

"The world has two moons," she was always telling them.

Berthe laughed when she heard that, and told her the full expression was, "The world has two moons, but only one sun," meaning between doing what you should and what you must, the most important thing was to know what you could.

"You have two moons in your heaven," Paula said, thinking of Akiva and Pahid. "What's your sun?"

"Moons and sun and earth are all gods and goddesses. It remains to blend with their divinity," Berthe replied, and she slapped her horse to a gallop so Paula could not follow. She had been thinking of earth and Fea.

Berthe spent most of her time on horseback, riding up and down the big road to the Middle Plains as fast as the low-striding beast could carry her, with Neshar in her lap shrieking for glee, a spear in her hand and slingshot in her belt. She could cast while cantering bareback. Now and then she brought them a marsh bird or rabbit for supper.

"Why did they give Pahid sterile horses?" Clark asked her one evening.

"Before he set out from the Lir Temple, he fasted in the mountains for fifteen days and was granted a vision of Hath. Hath gave him armor and weapons and a hundred battle-trained horses," she began.

"What did Hath look like?"

"He shone."

"Everything shines when you're fasting," Clark objected. "Was he big? How did Pahid know who it was?"

"It told him."

There was no answer to that. Berthe said nothing either, and they ate in silence. At length, Clark said, "He must be the most powerful man in the world now."

"Until the horses die."

And they had brought the horses from off-planet because no one here could be trusted to train them and sterilize them, keeping not a single stallion in reserve to breed for a secret army. That explained the whole question of what the Eyimalian horses were doing on Paffir Haretz, and so simply that Clark and Paula burst into happy smiles. Everything was resolving itself. Surely Berthe would make her decision soon, and then--. It was hard to think of that moment, both because of what depended upon it and because of what lay beyond.

Days passed, and Berthe did not decide. She rode the horses daily until they had a week of rain and everyone crowded into the various huts to make clothing or pottery or mats or tools. In the furtherence of some scheme or other, Paula climbed up on the roof of the collapsed Verloringer dormitory to inspect it and was nearly struck by lightning in a squall. Clark saw her standing on the ridgepole, tunic fluttering in the rain-laden wind, uko branches slapping her as the trees swayed low, and then she disappeared over the side just as a bright finger touched on the roof with a horrendous crash and set some of the thatch on fire. A moment later she came around from the other side of the building, embarrassed but unharmed.

Clark spent the gloomy days writing his herbal and bright ones collecting samples. Berthe continued to help him. She taught him her leaf-and-seed alphabet, and unwittingly solved the Ecclesiam mystery.

"Pa'ula used to call out your name in her sleep," she said one morning.

"Did she." Clark, sitting beside her, started to turn away, but then he turned back and demanded, "What were you doing there, when she was sleeping?"

"Pahid told me to chant the ninety-seven goddesses over her--I don't know all ninety-seven names, but I pretended."

"Why did he--?

"When he asked her who her goddess was, she said she didn't have any. He thought one of them might enter while she was sleeping if I chanted them. Instead, she called out your name."

Clark brought his face close to her. "When did this happen?" It was strange; for the most part he liked Berthe, but when she reminded him of what she had done to Paula there was always a painful chill inside. He wanted to make her vanish. This was what it meant to feel one's gorge rise. Calming himself, he told her about his dream on the night of the worms.

"It was about the same time. But then, you thought of her often. I thought about Akiva every day when...when I was pregnant. Neshar. When I see him I think he is the blessing rain, the light that brings opposites into harmony, the third and best way. I wanted to find that way between Pahid's gods and my women's, between justice and beauty, but it will not be found in this generation, I think."

"We have both of them here."

"No, you have justice. Beauty and justice are like sun and rain. You have rain. Akiva has sun. Who has both?"

"Both reason and feeling?"

"I know you feel. But you feel love. Love is a word. Akiva does not feel words. He has no emotions; he does not feel these things. He is these things, himself." She looked down. "I go to him every night and we sit and look at one another. Sometimes he holds my hands to console me for what I have lost in him."

Clark studied the grainy surface of a page. "I can tell you he is always moved when somebody loves him," he said.

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

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