Click ~*~ to follow a thread.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
So the beast was led off and the next day they all stood patiently in the old dining hall for a peice of real bread carefully weighed out on the scale a Verloringer merchant, now gone, had rigged up in the days of plenty. Erkomt's squadron went through the line twice, but were stopped on thier third attempt. Neshar and Telinge, now washed, sat with Klyne's boys. The girlchild and boychild, identical grey tunics pressed together, looked alike as Rani and Rania.

"We shared each other's milk when we carried them," Tiyar heard Meta say. Could that explain it? He didn't know enough about it to guess, but he imagined the pregnant Berthe's strength begetting a second child in the other woman as she suckled her, and the thought made him angry as though he personally had wanted to take part in Meta's conceiving and been left out. While Meta showed her red cord and told how Pahid had declared all the herbalist women anethema, but every peasant who saw the cord gave or promised something to the City of Wisdom, Tiyar hung his head and watched the ghost images.

More Eyimalian horses were heading for the Middle Plains. The girl whose rape he had watched now walked slowly eastward, looking for a road to lead home. Near him in real life, Itscriyites with short-cropped hair and tatoo scars, thorn necklaces supposed to look like wolves' teeth rattling in their shirts, gulped their food and stood around in fours and fives, backs toward each other. Raiding parties. He signed them to him.

"Pahid is coming. We can expect him in a few weeks." Shoulders hunched. They scuffed at the ground, sulking. "I haven't told anyone yet, but you must prepare to fight. This time we will free ourselves. And he will bring provisions for his army."

For a moment there was no answer.

Erkomt said, "We need weapons."

Tiyar knew that to outfit them with Puros would be inviting a Viyato holocaust, but he wondered for a moment whether they could get away with something less obvious, and again he missed Paula. She would have known, or talked him out of it. Instead he was trapped with a lingering temptation. Sunlight fell through a gap in the cieling to illuminate a woman's chin. She carried a wooden threshing tool strapped across her back from hip to shoulder, the handle up and the flared end of the flail doubled behind it like a crown.

"We can't go against Pahid with these," Erkomt was saying. "We need spears and long blades. Then we can do things. We can get out of here--"

"You may leave whenever you wish," Tiyar answered curtly. The woman he had been watching moved slightly, and the crown and handle clinked together. He looked down. Her feet were bare.

"We could go south, to the capital. As long as Pahid stays in the Middle Plains, the capital is empty. I want to take over the Lir Temple, sit in one of those high towers and feel it crashing down."

Tiyar shrugged. He clapped Erkomt's shoulder to show that the formal conference was at an end. The squad disbanded and its members began to walk around among those who were still eating. "You want to begin a long march in winter, barefoot, with no supplies. How would you live?" he asked.

"We could live as long as we kept on walking," insisted a small, sharp-faced youth whose long hair was beginning to fall out. "I'd keep walking until the minute I died, and I bet by then I'd be in the Lir Temple archive."

Lovers were embracing within sight of an eye-in-hand. Tiyar felt the merciless laugh sweep upward again like desert wind, mocking faith. It was the truth that must roughen the lovers' tender expressions, yet they also spoke truly when they called their fleeting love immortal, a truth they grasped only briefly before it was retaken by the wind. "I had hoped you would want to fight," he said. "You will have the best weapons I can give you. But for now--" The desert wind itself, the old bitter allure of power, echoed in him. He was fighting a temptation stronger than comfort to the ascetics; he was fighting the temptation to make these youngsters his personal guard, and at the same time he made this great thankless sacrifice, he knew he must continually nourish their fanaticism or they would devolve into utter banditry. He smiled at himself, thinking here is Tiyar Kituman, not famous in history as a tyrant. What an accomplishment. But fewer, probably, than had stood at the brink of power and gone forward were those who had gone so far and turned back. "For now, I will give you no new weapons, because I do not want to alarm the rest of the camp. Train and wait."

Tiyar walked away, both from Erkomt and from the smell of yeast and wood smoke, toward the heavy swamp air now softening a little in the sunlight. Squad members were still walking among those who had been last in line. He saw one stop behind an old woman who sat dipping her bread in water to save her gums. She looked sadly at the big handful, every crumb of which must now be given over, and then at Tiyar in aimless, groundless hope. He never indulged in personal rescue any more because the delusion of doing good was too comforting. If I stop them now, they will rob her twice this evening, he told himself, stepping out into the bracing sun-brightened mist.

It was some time that afternoon, they later realized, that Meta's daughter vanished. None of the several women who had arrived with Meta, nor any of Akiva's students nor the older children who took care of the younger ones saw her after mid-day, when the weaver at whose loom she had sat in the morning, watching the shuttle go back and forth and the intertwining colors moount, had gotten up and gone to train.

The loss interrupted another argument between Tiyar and Fuego about whether to send more people off in boats before spring came. "What we have founded here, the city of wisdom, must live," Tiyar had been saying. "If all the strongest are sent away, the rest will die and this all be forgotten."

"You know what you're doing? You're founding a sect, that's what. A religious community complete with periodic incursions from outside." Fuego, truly angry, stopped to press his palms together, then went on. "And that kind of community either falls apart or becomes a nuisance and is crushed. We've got to keep moving outward."

"And what shall your pilgrims eat?"

"What are we eating now?" Fuego shot back. Defeated, they both fell silent.

Akiva suddenly put his hand into the fire and took out a burning ember. He let it roll across his hands and fall, leaving the skin undamaged. "You see? Our divinity is a simple thing. We are always doing the impossible."

They stared like babies. Akiva was about to do the trick again, but a group of Berthe's friends, men and women, came hurrying to the cave at that moment. Someone asked, "Have you seen the girl-child?" Then they were all caught up in the searching and calling and trying to understand, from all the people who thought they had seen her or might have seen her or just wished they could believe they had seen her, where she might have been last.

Verloringers lit hden-knots and searched on the wooded hillsides until the greater moon set. As they tired and began dropping the torches, the brush would flare up now and then until a bunch of laughing Itscriyites came with buckets to douse it. Finally they gave up and staggered away to sleep. On his way back to his own tent, Tiyar passed Meta standing astride the furious little stream that divided Akiva's sanctum from the rest of the camp. She was staring at the water, her fingers twisting the cord by which an herb bag dangled from her girdle. When the wound-up cord began to double back on itself, she dropped it and let the bag flounce.

It must have been the lesser moon shining beyond her shoulder, but used as he was to this world, Tiyar could not rid himself of the illusion that it was the greater. For a while he wondered whether the whole thing were not a dream. He saw Erkomt step out of the shrubbery--how could a big clumsy youth approach unseen?--with his squad. The woman of the threshing tool was grinning. Erkomt said, "We're going to look all night for your daughter. Give us food." He grinned, too, an ugly contemptuous leer of pleasure in inflicting distress.

Meta saw in that grin that he knew where her daughter was, not lost but held for some kind of ransom and thus, for the moment, safe. She gathered Erkomt's hands together and kissed them.

The next day they demanded extra bowls of the rendered wood. Morning and evening, Meta gave up her issued ration together with grateful kisses and frequently some other gift of food she had brought with her or foraged in the marsh, and then she would go to Berthe or Fuego to study or fight or cry. The fiction that Erkomt's gang was searching for her daughter gave Meta comfort, because it allowed her to bring him these kisses and gifts for her child. Sometimes she seemed to believe it.

"I am in love with him," she confided to Fuego. "At night I dream of his body."

Fuego laughed. He began talking about what it would be like, how much of his clothes the boy would consent to take off, what he probably looked like under them, and whether he would know what to do, until both he and Meta were giggling and Berthe, who had joined them, stopped her ears.

Meta ran to her and pushed her hands down, saying, "Listen, you silly thing. I have an idea. We can play a game with Telinge. Let's put letters in her food."

Tiyar got wind of the scheme when the squad leaders made their reports. Erkomt liked to come with them and stand in the back of the group while the others recited the week's progress in their various endeavours for Tiyar, Fuego and anyone else who cared to listen. A silent challenge to their talk of community and tolerance, he sat when they sat and stood when they stood but offered no report, and when the time came to touch hands all round the others avoided him. He stood with his plams out and fingers splayed like talons, repelling everyone. This time Tiyar ambled up to him, easily closed his long hands over the extended fingertips and said, "All this week you have been a Seeker."

"Something's waiting for me at the head of the Lir, under the weeping moon," Erkomt said, paraphrasing a song about Itscriye.

The other squad leaders bristled. No one wanted to remember the dead province. He added, "Something's waiting for a lot of us. A lot of us are waiting to go."

"Bring me a map of the way and provisions. Then we will go," Tiyar said.

Erkomt strutted off just as though he had won the argument and Tiyar, watching him, read "Telinge," in the herbal language, stuck to his hem. He remembered when he saw Meta slide her hand into Fuego's that that was the missing girl's name.

Tiyar paced around them, thinking that perhaps he should be angry. In one of the eye-in-hand pictures, an herbal witch was coming to visit some Daybreaker missionaries. He liked this one, a comely woman who seemed stupid at first but on occasion proved surprisingly quick. She never yielded to such emotions as pity, even when one of the missionaries, her only friends in the world, took sick and died. The sun came up above the hden-trees on the hillside and struck him. He stopped pacing. There seemed to be a number of bright insects in the grass.

"We must not begin to play tricks on Erkomt," he said.

Meta looked up with a vapid expression.

"We don't want to be drawn into his games." He felt one knee give way and sat down to conceal the trembling that came at moments like these when the hunger they all felt always would suddenly capture his attention like the thought of mortality stopping one member of a crowd all hurrying somewhere, to leave the one standing deep in thought while the others rush on.

Instead of Tiyar, Fuego got angry. His face turned rosy red, full of new blood. He said in Eyimalian, "You have been playing games since--since we came here. Thanks to you, that boy is a squad leader and people look up to him. He believes and they believe and I think you yourself almost agree with them that this toy army of yours is what's keeping us safe from Pahid, when you know perfectly well that if Pahid only said one word to the Viyatos the incendiaries would drop down from heaven and flush us out the way they torch the sewers in Merced to keep down the rats."

"Clearly he wishes to prevent the Viyatos from interfering further, because of the destruction it might entail and for fear of losing his position as intermediary. He has said so to Berthe," Tiyar replied.

"So he'll kill us himself, then."

"Yes, perhaps." By now, Tiyar realized, the perhaps was a lie. He had watched enviously while they fattened the horses and heard the clang of nails in the beasts new shoes. "That is why I am training the squadrons to fight."

"Except that they're so weak they can barely hold onto their weapons and they have no sense of community so they'd rather rob children and old people than plan strategy and if they were faced with real soldiers the best that could happen would be that they'd run."

Tiyar had absently put one of the little insects in his mouth. It tasted bitter. "What do you propose?" he asked.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
CONTINUE.....................

Go to Chapter: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 19 20 21
INDEX