Men did slip and die on the passes, but rarely. They grew up slogging back and forth along such tracks. Women, however, now and then lost their minds, a fault of the inferior stuff from which the goddess had created them.
“You must come with us,” the priest said to Tibo now, “you must come and be questioned before Cah, in the temple. But first, bring us beer to drink, and some sweet cakes.”
It was a sin, and she understood it was a sin. As with the man who had fathered her son, Tibo was aware of the lawless thing she did. Her thoughts were transparently ordinary on the day she killed Orbin. She had meant to see to it all winter, as soon as an opportunity arrived. An execution. The moment he had told her what he had done, that instant, she had known she would have his life. But rationally, she stipulated that it must be a murder the wordly blame for which she might escape. There was Orhn to tend. There was the mere fact of living.
But too much had gone on, and they suspected her, as she had always foreseen was possible. That had made no change in her resolution when she considered it beforehand, and she did not alter her vision of the killing, now. She had needed to kill Orbin.
Yet curiously somehow Tibo had not despaired of Cah. Even though she had transgressed Cah’s supremest edicts—or had she? It was Orbin who had flouted Cah, ungenerative Orbin, who had given away the born gift of a boy to aliens.
As she walked after the litters, two of the temple servants behind her, Tibo did not tremble or loiter. She did not peer after the spot where Orbin had gone down, nor hang back as they approached it. And when, at long last they came in sight of Ly, Tibo quickened her step.
“Speak freely. Remember you are heard, and seen. Cah hears. Cah sees.”
“You birthed a child.”
“After many years’ barrenness.”
The temple was very dark, almost lampless. Perhaps for holiness’ sake at this testing, or perhaps because of the lean season and a lack of oil. Out of the dark, velvet-black, the part-seen shape of the goddess, concave face, bulging mammalia. Catching light, the eyes, like lights themselves.
The priests spoke to Tibo in dismembered voices, as she stood by the alter.
They believed she was guilty. They believed that, when this ritual was done, they must throw open the doors and give her to the people of Ly, to be stoned to death.
Even the High Priest had entered the body of the temple, to witness the proceedings, and his head had altered to the mask and beak of a huge predatory bird. A woman became important when she broke the law.
But Cah also was there. Cah’s shadow and her eyes, listening, watching.
Cah—
“Woman-Tibo, tell us now, who fathered your child?”
Tibo drew in the solid air of the temple, blood, unguents, smoke—the smell of Cah. Words came: She spoke them.
“The father of my child was the man given to me by Cah.”
Tibo waited, an electric tingle on her skin, inside her bones. Was it a lie? By law, Cah had given Tibo Orhn. By magic and desire, Cah had given Tibo Yems, the stranger. It was what Tibo had always believed. Was a sin still a sin when the goddess offered it? If she was wrong, now Cah would strike Tibo down.
But Cah did not strike Tibo.
There was only the loud silence of the dark and the oil sputter and the breathing of the priests.
“You say you took and bore the child lawfully?”
“I bore him according to Cah’s will,” Tibo said. Now she knew it was so. She said the phrase with triumph and conviction.
“Woman-Tibo,” said a priest, (they questioned her or commented, she thought, in turn), “Orbin fell from the mountain and died. What do you know about that?”
“I didn’t see it,” she said. This was true. She had drawn away and turned her back on him, as he slid and floundered and toppled into space. It was not squeamishness or even superstitious fear that made her do so, but an unwillingness he should behold her face, as if that might somehow help him. But had Cah prompted her, also, then? So that she might declare now I didn’t see?
“You say you’re guiltless of Orbin’s death?”
Tibo said, “Masters, I’m only a woman. Orhn had to sell our son, we had no money. Orbin went to get new stock, to sacrifice to Cah so she’d be lenient to us. Now Orbin is dead. All this sorrow.”
“But are you guilty, woman?”
“Isn’t a woman always some way guilty, if trouble comes on her men?”
The words—from Cah. Cah instructed, Cah taught her. There was no need for any confusion. The laws were wrong. Or Cah had made a new law for Tibo, and Tibo performed her will.
The priests murmured and hissed to one another in the dark, and their adornments clicked and rustled. Then the High Priest spoke through the curved beak of the bird.
“Woman, you’re obtuse. But you will have to satisfy custom. If you’re innocent, put your right hand on the foot of Cah. Otherwise, confess now.”
Tibo hesitated. She did not know it, but she had been in a sort of trance more than three months long. It had come on her at the moment Orbin, seated there in the firelight, revealed that he had sold Raier. In this trance, Tibo had gone about her household duties as ever, worked and slaved, eaten her meager share, slept her curtailed sleep. In the trance she had not wept or complained, had not torn out her hair or rent her cheeks with her nails, had not fallen down screaming. No. She had only waited, with the promise of Orbin’s slaughter in front of her. And when it was accomplished, still the trance supported her, and did so yet.
However, the clarity of the trance enabled her, additionally, at the High Priest’s pronouncement, to recollect a scene of her infancy. She had been taken to Ly and when there, her mother and sisters had mixed themselves amid a crowd under the temple hill. It was a day in the hot months, the sky and the earth blistering. From the temple came a sudden muffled shrieking, and next the doors opened and a woman was dragged out and down the hill by some of the temple’s servants. She was an adulteress, Tibo discovered later—for her sisters whispered of the circumstance for years, even dating things by the day of the stoning. As the rocks began to fly, Tibo’s mother and sisters slinging their portion determinedly, (though Tibo was too young to join in), Tibo had noticed, without comprehension, that the woman’s right hand had been hurt. Even before the stones flailed against her, she kneeled and wailed in agony, though when the onslaught began she had tried to shield herself. Tibo recalled one missile hitting the forehead of the adulteress. Then she fell back and was quiet. The stoning nevertheless did not end until the priests up on the temple terrace, sure the death sentence was complete, gave a signal.
But Tibo was not an adulteress. She had done the will of Cah.