7. Sisters of the Hive
DAYS:
Each light between sunrise
And sunset Is worth dying for at least once
The smoky scent of the jasmine candles and the perpetual sleepy buzz of the Hive temple, the half-frightened, half-exalted breathing of the other girls, all the sounds and odors that surrounded her at the moment the world changed beyond all recognition would never again completely leave her mind. But how could it be otherwise? It would have been overwhelming enough just to meet the Living God on Earth, the Autarch Sulepis Bishakh am-Xis III, Elect of Nushash, the Golden One, Master of the Great Tent and the Falcon Throne, Lord of All Places and Happenings, a thousand, thousand praises to His name, but what happened to Qinnitan at this moment was beyond belief—and always would be.
Even a year later, when she would have to abandon a life of splendid leisure in the Palace of Seclusion and run in terror of death through the dark streets of Great Xis, every moment of this day would still be alive inside her a day that had begun like many others, with her friend Duny poking her out of bed in the darkness before sunrise.
Duny had been so aflutter with excitement that morning she could barely keep her voice in a proper whisper. “Oh, get up, Qin-ya, get up! It’s today! He’s coming! To the Hive!”
The events of that day would lift Qinnitan up to heavenly heights, to honors not just undreamed-of, but so impossible as to be ludicrous even to imagine Still, if she had known all of what was to come, she would have done anything to escape, as a jackal in a trap will gnaw through its own leg in its desperation for freedom.
They hurried down the corridor, two lines of girls with hair still damp from the water they had splashed on their faces and heads in the ritual cleansing, their robes sticking to their bodies, making a lively chill that would not last long in the rising heat of the day Qmnitan’s own black hair hung in lank, loose ringlets, the odd reddish streak hardly visible when it was wet. When she was a baby, the old women of Cat’s Eye Street had called it a witch streak and made the pass-evil sign, but no sign of witchery or anything out of the ordinary at all had followed. Some of the other children had called her “Striped Cat,” but other than that, by the time she was old enough to range the streets and alleys in the neighborhood of her parents’ house, no one paid any more attention to it than they did to a mole on the nose or crossed eyes.
“But why is He coming here?” Qinnitan asked, still not quite awake.
“To find out what the bees think,” Duny said.
“Of course.”
“Think about what?” The priestesses and the Hive Mistress often spoke about autarchs coming to seek the wisdom of the sacred bees, tiny oracles of the all-powerful fire god Nushash, but the names they cited were of the impossibly distant past—Xarpedon, Lepthis, rulers whom Qinnitan had only ever heard mentioned during the boasting of the Great Hive’s caretakers. But now the real, living autarch, the god-on-earth himself, was coming to consult with the fire god’s bees. It was hard to believe. Her father had been a priest in the temple of Nushash all his life but had never been favored with a visit from an actual autarch. Qinnitan had been a sworn acolyte priestess for scarcely more than a year. It almost didn’t seem fair.
This autarch, Sulepis, was a fairly young god-on-earth still. He had only been on the Falcon Throne for a short time—Qinnitan could remember his father, the old autarch Parnad, dying (followed more violently by several of his other sons, who had been the current autarch’s rivals) when she had first gone to serve the bees, the funereal hush that had lain so deeply on the Hive temple that she had been surprised later to discover things were not always that way. Perhaps the autarch’s youthtulness explained why he was doing astounding things like visiting a smoke-filled apiary in one of the more obscure corners of Nushash’s sprawling, ancient fire temple.
“Do you think He’ll be handsome?” Duny asked in a strangled whisper, clearly shocked and thrilled by her own daring Sulepis had spent most of his first months on the throne chastising some of the outer provinces who had thought, falsely and to their subsequent regret, that the new, young autarch might prove timid. Thus, he had not found time for the sort of processions or public events that made the common people feel as though they knew their ruler Qinnitan could only shrug and shake her head. She couldn’t think of the autarch in that way and it hurt her head even to try. It was like a worm trying to decide whether a mountain was the right color. She wasn’t angry, though she knew her friend was frightened, and who wouldn’t be? They were going to meet the living god, a being as far above them as the stars, someone who could snuff all their lives more easily than Qinnitan could kill a fly.
For a brief moment—it was always too brief—the acolytes passed out of the narrow passageway into the high-windowed gallery that crossed from the living quarters to the temple complex Twelve to fifteen steps at most, depending on how quickly the leading girl was marching, but it was the only chance Qinnitan had to see below her the magnificent city of Great Xis, a city in which she had once, if not exactly run free, at least lived at street level, among people that spoke in normal tones of voice In the Hive scarcely anyone ever spoke above a whisper—although sometimes the whispers could be as intrusive as shouts.
“Do you think He’ll speak? What do you think He’ll sound like?” “Quiet, Duny!”
Qinnitan had just a few moments each day to savor the world outside the temple, even if she only saw it at a distance, and she missed it very much. As always, she opened her eyes wide as they crossed the windowed gallery, trying to drink in every bit she could absorb, the blue sky bleached mostly gray with the smoke of a million fires, the pearl-white rooftops stretching far beyond sight like an endless beach covered with squared stones, interrupted here and there where the towers of the greatest families thrust up into the air. The towers’ colorful stripes and gold ornaments made them look like the sleeves of splendid garments, as though each tower were a man’s fist raised toward the heavens. But of course the rich men of the tower families had no complaints against the heavens instead of clenched in a fist, their tower-hands should be spread wide, in case the gods should decide to throw down even more good fortune on people already choked with it.
Qinnitan often wondered what would have happened if her own family had been one of the ruling elite instead of only a middling merchant family, her father a landholder instead of a mere functionary in the administration of one of Nushash’s larger temples. She supposed it could have been worse—he could have been a lackey of one of the other gods, fast losing power to the great fire god. “We are so lucky to have this for you,” her parents had told her when she had been admitted as an acolyte of the Sisters of the Hive, although she herself had prayed—blasphemy, but there it was—that it would not happen. “Far richer families than ours would shed blood for such an honor. You will be serving in the autarch’s own temple!”
The temple, of course, had proved to be a sprawl of connected buildings that seemed only slightly smaller than Great Xis itself, and Qinnitan one of so many hundreds of Hive Sister acolytes that it was doubtful even the priestess in charge of her living quarters knew more than a few of their names.
“I don’t know what I’ll do if He looks at me. If I faint, will He have me put to death?” “Please, Duny. No, I’m sure people faint all the time. He’s a god, after all.” “You say that so strangely, Qin. Are you feeling ill?”