Finally Osi spoke. “Our rites are our own. You know that we share little with women.”
Iso sounded embarrassed as he added, “Never in our pilgrimage have we before experienced the least temptation to open our wisdom to any female.”
“Never before now,” his brother added. “You are different.”
“We will show you some of the ways of shielding yourself from the eyes of a god.” Or goddess, I thought, as Iso went on: “And we will think on how to turn aside this Blackblood’s thrust of divine will.”
No one would claim my child. Not Blackblood, not Desire. No one but me. Even my claim as mother was only proxy on my daughter’s eventual claim upon herself.
I spent several productive days with Iso and Osi. Even now, after all that later took place, I recognize that they stand among the greatest teachers I ever knew. Before sundown I would leave them and find quiet corners in which to sleep about the wintering city. The warehouse district offered possibilities for protected rest among untended burlap sacks or just above the musty warmth of stables. I was just as glad I’d placed my silk in Endurance’s care for a little while. It was bulky, delicate, and not always so silent as I required.
I did not need to seek out food, as the twins were kind enough to provide for me, though we never shared directly. In regard to my being absent from the affairs of Copper Downs, it suited me that Mother Vajpai and Samma and Surali might think me plotting against them with hidden forces. Sadly, I had no such forces, but the fears of my enemies were ever my allies. As for Chowdry, he could manage Little Baji on his own. Whatever the pardine Revanchists were about did not concern me until they chose to make it my affair. Which they would, soon enough, if Samma’s theft of the Eyes of the Hills and subsequent loss of them to me were to become known.
This education was different, more focused than what had taken up earlier years of my life. Instead of spending my days fighting, or learning the finer points of some household art, I labored at understanding the mechanisms and foibles of the gods. While this warehouse was neither the Pomegranate Court nor the Temple of the Silver Lily, I was back in the schoolgirl’s seat again by my own choice.
I enjoyed the process immensely.
Iso and Osi taught just as they spoke-with shared voice and overlapping movement. Again and again I was struck by their almost eerie closeness, and wondered how they would have fought, if their rite had called upon them to be so trained. I resolved that if I should ever have the raising of children beyond my own-a possibility, given my eventual ambitions in Kalimpura-that I would school them much as I had been, across a broad range of skills and interests, save without the bondage and petty cruelties. And I would pay very special attention indeed to any twins who came into my care.
Gods tended to settle into their temples and places of power. That was obvious enough. The mechanisms were not so clear. Newborn, drunk with the energy of their creation, as both Choybalsan and Endurance had been, they could walk the world. Older gods like barnacles became not so much senescent as sedentary. Their miracles grew quieter. Here I thought of the Lily Goddess and how She spoke to the Temple Mother back in Kalimpura. Much like the difference between a maple seed spinning on the wind and a tree rooted and grown large.
“But,” I asked, “a god cannot grow into a titanic, right? They were possessed of the power of their place and time at the morning of the world. This gradient of rank you speak of does not flow smoothly in both directions.”
Iso smiled at me, the broad, quick grin of a teacher’s pleasure in their student. “The world changes. A flower cannot grow on hard rock, or salty sand. In these later ages, the plate of the earth no longer offers fallow soil rich enough for titanics to take root.”
“So only those titanics such as Time”- and Desire -“who survived from before the sundering of the gods are still about.”
“No one raises temples to them,” Osi said quite seriously.
“They are woven into the fabric of this crowded world.” I wondered what those words of mine said about the titanics. Was stifling your siblings from returning to their power blessed foresight or the worst sort of betrayal?
Iso frowned. “Fair enough. For now.”
We continued to pursue related matters. How worshippers affected a god. Why altars might be broken, and even a little of how; then far more of why not and how not to do such things. What the true role of priests was-not intermediaries for divine favor, as I’d always understood, but serving to shield people who might follow the god from the raw force of divine regard. Which explained some of Chowdry’s behaviors. He had been changing. Even the diffident, reluctant pirate Chowdry I’d met aboard Chittachai would have thought it the height of idiocy to leave a gate unguarded, or at least unbarred. The new Chowdry infected by Endurance’s almost overwhelming mute nonviolence had done exactly that.
“Gods are like an ague or a grippe,” I argued. “A plague of faith spreads about a place. It rages early and strong. Soon the people most subject to be taken by it have been infected, while the rest make their accommodations. In time faith subsides, mostly affecting travelers and newborns and those with a sudden change of circumstance. Priests carry faith the strongest. They spread the complaint, while also shielding the worst of its effects.” I wondered how this explanation squared with, for example, the betrayal of Blackblood by Pater Primus and his hierarchy.
Osi shook his head. “I would not have thought to explain it so, Mistress Green, but it seems that you have a grip upon the question.”
“So the gods need us to carry them through the world, as fleas need the rats who carry them from ship to ship and port to port. What do we need them for?”
“You of all people should be able to answer that,” Iso replied sharply.
In the course of our instruction, I’d told them more of my own history and the various events that had brought me to this point. Judiciously edited, of course, to protect the guilty. I also continued to avoid any reference to my encounter with Desire. I’d come to appreciate that while these two did not have personal interests in the disputes of Copper Downs, they certainly had purposes that might not be fully aligned with mine.
Choosing my words carefully, I ventured a reply. “We need them for protection from ourselves, I suppose.”
“Go on,” Osi said.
Somehow, in my readings this question about our need for gods had always been assumed to be a basic condition of humanity. “Blackblood is a pain god. He relieves suffering, in a sense. That is his rite and sacrament. I know there are temples in this city devoted to the rites of death, and others to healing. There are gods for sailors and shepherds and to watch over women. But such a view renders our gods into little more than guildmasters, parceling out skills and favors for those who petition correctly at need.”
“Some gods are small,” Iso replied. “To meet small needs.”
“Faith,” said Osi, “any faith, charts a course through life. Sets a purpose. If one’s life has enough room in it to look beyond another meal and a safe place to sleep, one begins to ask questions. Questions faith, and a god, can help answer.”
I thought of Shar’s unquiet desperation on my father’s poor sliver of land back in Bhopura. Her life had no room to look beyond her next starveling meal. By contrast, the Temple of the Silver Lily was packed full of fractious, well-fed women who asked questions all the time. And demanded answers. Was it fair to say that we there had faith and Shar did not? “Not so much faith,” I answered, finishing my thought aloud, “as a framework for living.”