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Fuego sang to himself as he poured woodchips into the vat from which, by means of a spout at the bottom, he drew off the pre-digested syrup it took all Tiyar's discipline to eat without protest. Fuego's cheer remained so impenetrable that Tiyar suspected him of liking the food. He was uncanny. He smiled with the brown stuff clinging to his teeth. Could it be a noble fraud? "Fuego, in all honesty, and for the love of true spirit, do you like that food?"

"Sure. Keeps your claws sharp."

"You have stopped losing weight."

Fuego smiled. "Gained. Before we lost the stores I was gaining steadily, and haven't lost much since. I really think we could live--" He had squatted down and brought his face near Tiyar, beaming with enthusiasm.

Tiyar said, "--on chemically treated wood, enriched by the insects and grubs you culture on--let us be honest--the bacteria that escape our digestion? We only die more slowly."

"That's the trick, isn't it?"

Tiyar smiled; near Fuego's shoulder a transparent woman sat eating a potato. Already those stones planted in the fields were having a good effect. Pahid found them everywhere among the lawful crop, robbing nourishment from grain sown at the command of Temple priests. That was the Viyatos' grain, the wheat and rye and corn meal that would go south to the Lir for taxes and then in hypercompressed form to Eyimalia. Farms planted the mandated areas with grain, but then they tossed potatoes in between the rows. Pahid's answer was to burn all the houses where he found potatoes, and often to kill the farmers who lived in them, but the peasants were old hands at hiding crops. In the parishes where potatoes grew, the little Verloringer missions were thriving. The woman eating a potato looked thin, but not nearly so thin as the women who passed before him in full flesh, going to bed their children down before Akiva began the evening prayer.

"Yes, old man, the trick is to die slowly, of course. But your cheerfulness astonishes me. Is it love?" Strange that he could question Fuego so intimately, but now that they worked in almost public opposition, they had grown friendly. There is never any shyness between enemies, Tiyar thought. He missed Paula Maxwell more than anyone.

"Fear rules the heart!" Fuego said, laughing. He pointed to the shoulder where he had had that motto tattooed in his fighting days. "Lovers make the world seem real. All kinds of love do that, they make things seem important. But a teacher makes your own self real. To be a lover and a student at once--I couldn't do it, except that Akiva...can teach love. I never knew it could be taught. I thought it was inherent. I never believed it could be transmitted, though I've been a student before. I was a student of Sevit. Sure, I only knew Sevit through books, but I knew him as well as I knew anyone. And Luz was my teacher. But until I met Akiva, I hardly knew what they were teaching me. Now I could go away forever tomorrow and not be sad, because he's taught me love."

"You speak like Holy Huey, in paradoxes. Are you about to tell me what he says: Once you are truly dead at heart you are immortal?" Tiyar asked. Though his tone remained almost flirtatious, sorrow again besieged his thoughts.

"No, can't say I am. When I was dead at heart I wasn't immortal, was I?"

"And now you are no longer dead. That is what interests me."

"When she came back with him...well, you could see she was the missing link between him and Neshar, of course. And between him and the Temple. I used to wonder how it could have happened, how he became so detatched and so passionate in this world. Everyone else, the whole Temple, is so caught up and so formal. The culture as a whole seemed to have very little respect for feeling. Marriage without friendship, children as property. And then he, who wants to make himself part of everything. You can't trip over a stone on the ground without his feeling it and thinking about it."

Tiyar shook his head.

"It was her, the break between him and the Temple. The link. I wonder what she's done with Pahid, how she changed him. She was so full of him when she came here. He converted her. She's been converted three times, and a real conversion is like dying, you know. The first night she was here, I still lived in that cave with the students, near Akiva's. So I was sitting outside, looking at the moonlight, meditating like a good student, jealous as a kid brother at a wedding, and I saw her. We all thought she was in with Akiva, but there she was leaning on a rock, crying because he'd made her start doubting Pahid and she didn't want to lose the Temple gods. She was between faiths. And Pahid had told her the Lir Temple gods would destroy the world. So I sat with her, rocking back and forth like we used to--Luz and I--when the other kids picked on her or when she came back from Daybreaker meetings upset about the state of the Outlander people. I understood then what the Pravelany meant when they talked about reincarnation. I'd always thought it was a metaphor for conflict, but it's a metaphor for love."

One of the two small foreign moons now rising silhouetted a bird's nest so high in the top of an uko tree that it seemed to be drifting. Tiyar imagined the birds crowded together inside, hiding their heads and feet from the cold wind that might blow the nest donw from its perch at any moment. If they saw their position as I do, they would creep on the ground like snakes, he thought. Among the ghostly images from the eye-in-hands a man sat up, yawned and lay down again.

"Let's go hear Akiva," Fuego said, starting off up the hill.

It was a short walk in bright moonlight, but when they came to the evergreens that led up to the rocky hilltop where Akiva's cave lay, Tiyar could have wished the distance were shorter. The ground sloped toward a little freshet where the moonlit water plunged and spouted. They crossed the wild stream haphazardly, stepping in the darker pools they couldn't see.

"What happened to the little bridges Krup made for us?" Tiyar asked.

"We've eaten them."

"Why?"

Fuego shrugged. "I didn't want to place too much burden on the living trees."

A semicircle of faces met them at the cave. "Don't look at me. Look out there!" Akiva was telling them. "Listen. Feel the emanations of godhood without and the echo of that same godhood in yourselves. That is the real hunger, the hunger of divinity within to rejoin the divine beyond this tomb, this flesh. To feel that echo is why we live. After that we can die," he finished mildly.

He learned that from Fuego, Tiyar thought. Fuego was bringing him to the people, like Fatayad reconciling Earth to mankind. Both would climb transcendant to heaven, leaving Tiyar with the mob. On him devolved the task of finding some way they could survive here until spring.

Voices sang in the forest. "Babyface, babyface, make us cry. Your papa set you free and your mama let you die." Tiyar's hand flew to the hormone detector, but at the same time that he located and counted them, making ready to fight, his heart was joining the song. They hated, simply, all the dull slow maddening forces that had brought them there--history, greed, the long blind struggle against an enemy so formless and all-encompassing that it seeped into themselves. He hated, too, and he almost hoped they would come out to stone him now, so he would at least have taught them defiance. But the song came no nearer and the men and women turned back to Akiva, thier arms around each other, a bony hand at rest on each shoulder.

"If you are ready, if you hear the voice of the wind in your own voices, if you see with the eyes of the moons as they see, if you feel that within you which you thought was a lone spirit pulled like tidal water to join its ocean, you are free. This is Ayekar. I welcome you." Akiva embraced each one, a true embrace, not merely formal.

"Wait. Is this your answer, to depeople the world? We are among her greatest beauties." Tiyar heard his voice speak, and it shook with emotion, terrified by the hollowness of his own words.

"Wait," Fuego echoed.

"Babyface, babyface, make us cry. Your papa set you free and your mama let you die," the far-off voices sang.

"Do you hear that song?" Berthe was asking. "We all know its real meaning. It comes from the days when the priests conquered us. They ruined the ancient cities on the Lir, built their temples and scattered the people to work the land for them. They supppressed the witches and replaced our medicine with temple magic. That's what it means by 'set you free.' But she will not die. Our earth sustains us, and we will protect her. Pahid threatens flood and storm and famine. He is nothing. He is a servant, like an ox. When we have torn down his temple, our earth will come face to face with the gods. He himself taught me so."

If they think an enemy believes it, then they believe it, Tiyar thought. The song grew louder. There were women singing, more women than men. They had come up behind the Itscriyites, singing their song, and had sung them down. These were Berthe's students. They arrived every few days by threes and fours, stayed as long as they dared, and took home artifacts to sell. The steady trickle of their proceeds was life to the camp, a weekly ration of nuts or meat or insects for each person on a rotating schedule that led to quarrels beyond number but that people cherished as the fruit of wisdom. When they saw the difference this ration made, how eyes lit, gestures quickened and faces drawn as leather suddenly beamed with gaity, Tiyar and Fuego would look at each other and silently acknowledge how little either of them liked to be present for this. Either they or Berthe had to be there because of the bickering, though, so they both came, and in these looks they promised not to leave one another alone.

"We knew Ayekar in the years of light. Only we remember. False priests can never free the gods; it must be we only," Berthe recited.

"Berthe, there you are!" cried a voice out somewhere in the trees. A group of women and children, together with a heavy-laden mule, emerged from the wood, surrounded by an Itscriyite patrol squad. Erkomt, the same owner of the tooth necklace, led the patrol. Even the name sounded aggressive, insubordinating. Tiyar felt weary.

"Metaling!" Now came embraces. These women were always turning up in the dead of night. The one called butterfly would have been somewhat ugly even at her best, but now that she was covered with dirt and sores, haggard, her eyes red from fatigue and hair clumped in dirty heaps on her shoulders, she looked like the nightmare shadow of the little girl clinging to her arm. Tiyar found himself wondering which was real, as though the truth could not possibly encompass them both.

"And you brought the girlchild," Berthe was saying. "Did they tell you I found the boy? Everything--"

Erkomt suddenly planted himself between Berthe and the new arrivals. "I found them," he said, grinning.

"Good," Tiyar replied.

"I brought them right to you. I didn't even search them."

Tiyar looked at the mule. "Good," he repeated. "Now you may go."

Erkomt mimicked him.

Tiyar was about to strike, but Fuego raised his hands and nodded slightly toward the cave where Akiva stood. Akiva came out, stepping over the little fire before him, and walked straight toward Meteling. He did not notice Erkomt, who tried to shoulder his way between them and finally backed off, looking foolish.

"You remember me," she said.

Akiva knelt. "Simple heart," he whispered. "Yes, waking and sleeping. You separate us and bring us together again. I have kept my promise."

Someone gave Neshar a push. The boy hurried to his father, who held him forward, hands trembling.

Meta bent down to see. "We called him Sunshine, because he had to live in the dark. We hid him like the Infant Spring. I knew you would take care of him." Straightening, she laid her hands on Akiva's head. "When you came into our shrine you were like the wolves on the mountain in winter. Wild and cold, and lost. But I gave you the baby and you looked as though something was rekindled that had gone out."

Everyone watched as they introduced Neshar to Meta's daughter, Telinge. The two children scrutinized each other. Neshar extended his hands in a formal greeting and said, "I can read."

Telinge pulled a crust of bread from her tunic and set it in Neshar's hand, answering, "So can I."

A couple of women cheered, some applauded and everyone laughed, except Erkomt and his squad. They gathered around the pack mule. Telinge had real bread; there must be grain in those sacks. The bags of woven cloth, bulging around the seams, brought to all thier minds glorious pictures of opulence, sacks merging with their shadows in torchlight so no one could tell just where they ended.

Again Akiva walked past Erkomt without seeming to notice him. He took the mule's bridle. Erkomt put his hand on the rope.

"You're not yet ready to die, are you?" Akiva asked him gently.

Erkomt stared at him, angry, then the two men began to smile and at last they both let go of the rope. Erkomt laughed. "We're already dead! We are the dead." He waved his hands to the people around him. "We're in Ayekar! We're starving to death in Ayekar!"

"Babyface, babyface, make us cry," the squad answered.

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

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INDEX