“Because of the pain. Instead of a suffering, a wasting of body and soul, it can become a sacrament. Some good may be found.” He idly rearranged the firewood as he spoke, choosing his words with care. “As I told you, pain is part of life. A god such as Blackblood guards many doors for the people. Those who worship him, as well as those who pretend he does not exist. Even those who have never heard of him.”
“So this man or boy suffers on your altar?”
“He suffers before the god arrives. Blackblood takes this up, takes him up. Sometimes…” Now I got a long, slow look, almost pleading. “Sometimes the pain is taken up, but the man or boy remains.”
I felt a chill down my spine as the drawing dusk stole the light around us. “What becomes of him then?”
“He lives to serve the temple.”
Ahh. Like the Bone Door on the alleyside of the temple of the Lily Goddess, only much more difficult to pass through. “As you did once,” I said, my voice very soft. My heart flooded with pity for him.
“As I did once.”
“Do you remember your family?”
“A small bit. Some recall more than others.” Septio looked troubled. “If a fever is on the blood or brain, there may be little left of the former life. If it is the crab disease within the gut, the memories may remain complete as the seat of reason remains untouched.”
“Most are taken up.” I hated that idea. “How sad for them.”
“No, no, you mistake me. Blackblood’s priests? The Pater Primus, Tertio, all of us?” The sadness in his face deepened. “We are the sacrifices he rejected. We serve him in life because we were not wanted as part of his substance. Each of us seeks to find his way back to the god.”
What a miserable theology, I thought. The victim blames himself because his pain was not good enough. “What of women who hurt? Or girls?”
“I d-don’t know.” Septio’s voice was quite small. “They die in pain, I suppose.”
That was quite enough of this conversation. I let it lapse only a little too late.
We were headed toward the Eirigene Pass. Our route was not up the Barley Road, which mostly followed the Greenbriar River as it ran through farming country, but another, higher trackway with little traffic. The soil was more sparse up here, and I knew from my studies that the conditions would be much harsher in the winter. The few steadings we saw were long abandoned.
“I do not wish to push through refugees,” Septio said.
I stared at my horse, unwilling to mount, but just as unwilling to sit by this stream for the rest of my days. “What refugees? Copper Downs is not exactly overrun by the desperate.”
“If Choybalsan has truly broken the Temple of Air, there will be villages’ worth of farmers and servants on the move.”
“Unless he’s sworn them all, or given them tea and cakes.” So much rumor, so little truth. This was an invasion of dust and shadows.
“I still think we are better served to find the place and follow his trail, than to swim against the tide he pushes before him.”
“They do not teach rhetoric so much in your temple, do they?” I gave him a sly grin, then levered myself into my saddle. Or tried to, as the nag sidestepped just enough to drop me on my face in the dirt.
This time she definitely laughed.
“I will get you a block, and hold her bridle,” Septio told me. “You need to be very firm with her today.”
Though it was tempting to shout him down for condescending to me so, I could not afford such pride. Instead I stood mute and glowering at my miserable beast while Septio arranged things. I resolved that once I was asaddle, I would remain there all day. This in turn immediately made me regret the amount of tea I had just drunk.
We set out into a morning marked by mist on the stones above us, and a few furry goats on high. The place was pretty enough, and the air crisp, but so very northern a view that I felt a surge of homesickness for the sweltering fields of Selistan. This was a Stone Coast I had known only from Mistress Danae’s books, for I had never left the Pomegranate Court to walk the high crags or upland meadows. Little engravings and bad poetry had told their story, but as a child might recount solstice gifts, with eccentric details and much missing of the point.
I reveled in the hundred shades of gray that made up the tumbled rocks amid the scraggly grass, and their mother cliffs above. Late flowers peeked pale as babies’ eyes from thicker tufts. Sometimes a tree struggled away from the windbreak of its fellows, so a mighty giant could be little taller than I.
Small birds darted along the grass, juking and diving to catch the insects that fled before them. There were more goats. Occasionally the bones of a goat kill showed that something clawed and fanged kept a small kingdom here as well. When the trail ran close to the small river with its intermittent belt of trees, a different chorus of birds echoed from the shelter there.
The cliffs on both sides of us cut the sky into a ribbon of blue fabric from the loom of Mother Mooneyes. If a soul had a color, I imagined it might be that cerulean. Perhaps so many thought of paradise as lying somewhere above the air because we recognized the tint by instinct older than words.
That brought to mind a question that had slipped through my fingers more than a few times lately. “Septio.” I pitched my voice firmly to carry from one dangerous nag to the other, without startling the whole valley. “There is a priestly question I would ask you.”
“Perhaps I can answer,” he said cautiously.
I did not know if his easy confidence and edged humor had been left behind within Copper Downs, or if last night’s conversation about sacrifices weighed so heavily on him. Some good, solid theology of a more neutral sort might be the thing to bring him around.
“I have been thinking on theogenic dispersion,” I said. “About how gods and men draw power from one another.”
“Small questions. I doubt anyone has considered them before.”
His tone was so serious that for a moment I believed him. Then I realized that the city had not kept all of the best of this man behind.
“Fool,” I told him with affection. “I am serious.”
Septio laughed. The sound gladdened my heart.
We rode on, my miserable nag ensuring that I was jostled and bruised as much as possible. I gathered my thoughts.
“As I have read the tale, the gods and goddesses were once far greater and more powerful. World-urges, Lacodemus called them. They made the races of man, and perhaps the other thinking creatures. Then the theogenic dispersion came upon them. Small fragments of their divinity were scattered through the plate of the world. Some of those fragments became the sliver of grace we all carry within us. Others became the gods and goddesses we know in this life.”
He waited a moment to see if I was just pausing for breath. “A fair enough summation of what many believe.”
“I have also read that gods and goddesses arise from the thoughts and deeds of men. This Choybalsan, for example, is feared in part because he aspires to godhood.”
“Indeed.” Septio was noncommittal.
“So I am told that the gods created man, and that man created the gods.” I smiled. “The logic of this troubles me.”
He laughed again. No mockery was in him, just delight. His grin was genuine, and warmed my heart. “Why can they not both be true? Is it that you suppose time has a beginning and an end, and so one must have come first?”
“Well… yes…”
“The world has no beginning and no end. The plate goes on forever beneath the path of the sun. Why should time be bounded when the world is not? It could be that man creates the gods, then in time, gods create man. Each returns the service to the other like a pair of players at the shuttle-net.”
“That seems strange to me.” I tried to tease out what it was that disturbed me about this logic. “A baby is born, a girl-child grows, a woman lives, a crone dies. Life comes from her loins and it begins again. This is a cycle, not a circle. Every plant and animal does the same. Everything in the world, except for gods.”