It was but one more indignity, she raged inwardly, that she should require permission for something so natural—something so private. She wanted to say no; the word trembled on her lips. Rebellion was strong, defiance was strong, but nature was stronger still. She started to rise, then flinched back involuntarily when a lean white hand reached out to help her.
“You have no need to fear me,” he said, bending down to remove, by some trick she could not see, the chain from the silver cuffs. “I mean you no harm. Nor will anyone here offer you any indecency. The bracelets are meant only to prevent you from injuring yourself.”
Winloki glared up at him in surprised indignation. “Am I to suppose, against all reason, that I am not your prisoner?”
“You are our captive, certainly, but an honored one,” he answered gravely. “As for my companions and I, no doubt we appear monstrous enough to you, but we are priests and votaries of the Devouring Moon, essentially celibate.”
With that vaguely ominous word “essentially” echoing in her mind, Winloki walked past him and into the screening shrubs, where she did what she needed to do. Emerging from the bushes afterward, she spotted a little rivulet running downhill over the rocks and started in that direction. Almost immediately, guardsmen and acolytes surrounded her once more, escorting her over to the water, where she washed her hands, then back to her former place on the slope.
She sat down again, wrapping her skirts around her legs, brushed back her tangled hair, and inhaled deeply. After subsisting so long on the stingy air of the heights, she had almost forgotten what it really was to breathe.
Almost immediately, Camhóinhann returned and chained her wrists together again. “Perhaps you are ready to eat now?”
Coming to the disheartening conclusion that she only punished herself by refusing—and discomforted them not at all—Winloki nodded. Within moments a cold meal appeared, consisting of meat, cheese, cakes, and fruit (such a feast, indeed, as she had not known in weeks) offered to her on a wooden platter by a kneeling acolyte. She ate sparingly, only enough to keep up her strength. The idea of sharing their food robbed her of appetite, and the little that she did eat sat uneasily in her stomach.
Meanwhile, a thin nail-paring of a moon had appeared in the sky and it was time for the evening rite.
Wavering between guilt and a reluctant fascination, she realized that it was impossible for her not to watch. Though she cared nothing for their atrocious religion, or for their “goddess in human form,” she could not help being intrigued by their rituals.
As one man, all of the priests and acolytes dropped to the ground in a profound obeisance, with their arms outstretched and their faces in the dirt. Minutes passed, during which the worshippers remained moveless, silent. But Winloki could feel that something was happening, something that raised the hair at the back of her neck, made the nerves jump beneath her skin. Finally, as if in response to an unheard signal, they all rose together in a single movement, and Dyonas began to sing in a clear, high voice.
The words of his song were strange to her, and yet oddly familiar. It was as though he spoke in a language that she ought to know, but only halfway understood. Winloki closed her eyes, let the impressions wash over her. A great weariness and disgust began to press down on her, a crushing sense of futility.
She seemed to see a vast landscape as of all the world spread out before her: hills and mountains, oceans and rivers—and everything she saw was hideous, ill formed, wounded past healing. The moon rained down vapors, the skin of the earth cracked; men spread out across the face of the land like the lesions of a disease.
The entire race had degenerated: they were worse than vermin, less than apes, lower than the creeping things of the earth. The weak battened on the strong, the sick infected the well. Thousands suffered and died who should never have been born at all.
But then some quality in the words or music changed, and her sense of futility and despair began to lift.
She was in a place of burning gums and incenses, of hot, heavy perfumes. Skyrrans built no temples or fanes, yet something, some inner voice or the hymn itself, told her that this was a temple dedicated to Ouriána, goddess incarnated.
Upon the high altar, fires of purification and regeneration were burning, consuming the sins and sorrows of a suffering world, and praise for the Goddess rose to the heavens on the smoke of a thousand sacrifices. What was ill made (said Dyonas’s song) would be unmade and created anew. Let the ignorant, the cowardly, the misguided beware. It was not in their power to prevent the inevitable; their efforts at resistance only prolonged the agony. All must pass through the fire, either to perish or be transformed.
Finally, the hymn soared into sublime regions of felicity and hope.
Winloki found herself alone in the blue-black dome of the night. Stars flashed like diamonds. The moon was a fiery crystal egg, cloudy but translucent, and she could see a luminous amorphous shape inside, as of something struggling to be born. Then there was a sound so loud it shook the firmament, it fractured the sky. A cold wind blew in from some place of dark vacancy beyond the stars. The egg cracked, and a younger moon emerged, brighter than the sun and more glorious. Its birth was more than a sign, more than a portent; it was a promise and a pledge: present pain would give way to future bliss. No life would be wasted, not one drop of blood shed in vain. After the violent purgation would come a New Age, when men would live as gods.
As the last notes lingered on the air, Winloki discovered that she was weeping, though with what emotion—anger or fear or hope—she was not even certain.
The rite was over and darkness was swiftly gathering when one of the acolytes approached her to say that a tent had been prepared for her use. Three guards escorted her across the campsite. On a sudden impulse of curiosity, she lingered for a moment outside the tent, studying the faces of her guards—hoping that they, who were solid and human and ordinary, might offer some clue as to what awaited her, might be easier to comprehend than the ghastly priests or the grim and austere acolytes.
They were strapping young men, hardly older than she was herself, and they blushed like girls under her steady regard. As hard as she looked, Winloki could find nothing sinister about them, not for all their glinting, dark armor or their array of weaponry. If there was anything, anything to set them apart from the Skyrran soldiers she had lived with, healed, and (far too often) watched die in these last terrible months, she could not find it.
A movement on the other side of the camp drew her attention. It was the third priest, Goezenou, standing where a shaft of moonlight illuminated his hawk-nosed, lantern-jawed face. Too many times, during the course of the last day and night, she had noticed him watching her, not with the same disinterested vigilance as the others, but as though he wanted something from her. The guards caught sight of him at the same time she did, and all three turned taut and watchful. One of them stepped between her and the furiádh, as if to shield her—or perhaps to prevent her from seeing something not meant for her eyes.
Whatever he meant by it, the gesture came too late. She had already met the full force of a glance so intense and disturbing it made her feel violated. If ever she had looked into the face of raw, unadulterated evil, she had just done so now.
She ducked quickly inside the tent and sank down on the ground, breathless and queasy, trying to regain control over herself, to quell the bone-shaking shudders of revulsion.
At length, the sickness passed, and she began a listless examination of her surroundings. Gradually it dawned on her that the tent was not without its luxuries: a bed of heather and somebody’s beautiful fur-lined cloak to serve as a blanket; a lantern; a folding stool; a flask of wine and a silver cup; a basin of water and a cloth to wash her face. It was evident that someone had taken considerable thought for her comfort. But who had it been? And just how long and how far could she count on that someone’s goodwill?