I knew that to the Alds a temple meant a full-sized building. I didn’t care.
My question did get his mind off the notion of allnight sex, anyway. He frowned and said, “What do you mean? Everybody goes into temples.”
“What for?”
“To pray!”
“What do you mean, ‘pray’?”
“Worship Atth!” Simme said, staring.
“How do you worship Atth?”
“You go to the ceremony?” he said, in a questioning tone, incredulous that I didn’t know what he was talking about. “And the priests sing and drum and dance, and they speak the words of Atth? You know! You’re down on your hands and knees? And you knock your head on the ground four times and say the words after the priests.”
“What for?”
“Well, if you want something, you pray to Atth, you knock your head on the ground and pray for it.”
“Pray for it? How do you pray for something?”
He was beginning to look at me as if I was feebleminded.
I returned the look. “You don’t make sense,” I said.
I was in fact rather curious to understand his idea of praying, but I didn’t want him to start feeling superior to me. “You can’t pray for things.”
“Of course you can! You pray to Atth for life and health and, and, and everything else!”
I did understand him. Everybody cries out to Ennu when they’re frightened. Everybody prays to Luck for things they want; that’s why he’s called the Deaf One. But I said, contemptuously, “That’s begging, not praying. We pray for blessing, not for things.”
He was both shocked and stymied. He looked sullen. He said, “You can’t be blessed. You don’t believe in Atth.”
Now I was shocked. To say to someone that they couldn’t be blessed, that was horrible. Simme didn’t seem like a person who could even think such a cruel thing. I finally said, much more cautiously, “What do you mean, ‘believe in’?”
He stared at me. “Well, to believe in Atth is—is to believe Atth is god.”
“Of course he is. All the gods are god. Why shouldn’t Atth be?”
“What you call gods are demons.”
I thought about it for a while. “I don’t know if I believe there are demons, but I do know the gods. I don’t understand why you have to ‘believe’ in only one god and none of the others.”
“Because if you don’t believe in Atth you’re damned and when you die you’ll turn into a demon!”
“Who says so?”
“The priests!”
“And you believe that?”
“Yes! The priests know about stuff like thad” He was getting more and more unhappy, and spoke angrily.
“I don’t think they know much about Ansul,” I said, realising, a little late, that antagonising him was not the best way to get information out of him. “Maybe they know all about Asudar. But things are different here.”
“Because you’re heathens!”
“Right,” I said, nodding, agreeing. “We’re heathens. So we have a lot of gods. But we don’t have any demons. Or priests. Or temple prostitutes. Unless they’re about six inches high.”
He was silent, scowling.
“I heard the army came looking for a specially bad place here,” I said after a while, trying to speak in a more friendly way and feeling both devious and exposed. “Some sort of hole in the ground where all the demons are supposed to come from.”
“I guess so.”
“What for?”
“I don’t know,” he said. He looked very glum, screwing up his pale eyes and frowning.
We were sitting on the pavement in the shade of the wall. I began scratching criss-cross patterns in the dust on the paving stone.
“Somebody said your king in Medron died,” I said, as easily as I could. I used our old word, king, not their word, gand.
He merely nodded. Our discussion had discouraged him. After a long time he said, “Mekke said maybe the new High Gand would order the army back home to Asudar, I guess you’d like that.” He glanced at me sullenly.
I shrugged. “Would your”
He shrugged.
I wanted to make him go on talking, but didn’t know how.
“That’s fit-fat,” he said.
Now I looked at him as if he was crazy, till I saw he was looking down at the pattern I’d made on the dusty stone. He reached over and drew a horizontal line in one square of the criss-cross.
“We call it fool’s game,” I said, and drew a vertical line in another square. We played to a draw, as you always do in fool’s game unless you really are a fool. Then he showed me a game called finding the ambush, where you each have a hidden criss-cross with a square marked off—the ambush—and you guess in turn where the other person’s ambush is, and the one who finds the other’s ambush first is the winner. Simme won two out of three, which cheered him up and made him talkative.
“I hope the army gets moved back to Asudar,” he said. “I want to get married. I can’t get married here.”
“Gand Ioratth did,” I said, and then was afraid I’d gone too far, but Simme just grinned and made a lewd chuckling noise.
“’Queen’ Tirio?” he said. “Mekke says she was one of those temple prostitutes, to start with, and she put a spell on the Gand,”
I’d had enough of him and his temple prostitutes. “There were never any temples,” I said. “We had festivals. All over the city. Processions and dances. But you Alds stopped them. You killed anybody who danced. You were so afraid of your stupid demons.” I got up, rubbed out the criss-cross with my foot, and stalked off to the stable.
Once I got to the stables I didn’t know what to do. I was ashamed of myself. I had not endured. I had run away. I looked in at Branty, who acknowledged me with a half nicker. He was lipping up a little treat of oats delicately, making them last. The old hostler was perched up on a sawhorse nearby, watching him with what looked to me like adoration. He nodded to me. Branty went on twiddling his oats. I leaned up against a post and folded my arms and hoped I looked aloof and unapproachable.
And here came Simme across the stableyard, slouching and cringing and grinning like a dog that’s been yelled at.
“Hey, Mem,” he said, as if we’d parted days ago instead of two minutes ago.
I nodded at him.
He looked at me the way the old hostler looked at Branty,
“My father’s horse is over there,” he said. “Come see her. She’s from the royal stables in Medron,”
I let him lead me across the yard to the facing stalls to show me a fine, nervous, bright-eyed sorrel mare with a light mane, like the horse that had run at me in the market. Maybe it was that horse. She eyed me sideways over the door of the stall and shook her head.
“She’s named Victory,” Simme said, trying to pat the mare on the neck; she tossed her head and moved back in the stall. When he tried again, she turned at him, showing her long yellow teeth. Simme drew his hand back quickly. “She’s a real warhorse,” he said.
I gazed at the horse as if judging it from a deep knowledge and experience of horses, nodded again rather patronisingly, and sauntered back across the yard. To my relief Chy and Shetar were just looking in the gateway. Several horses, seeing or smelling the lion, neighed and kicked in their stalls. I hurried over to Chy, while behind me Simme called, “See you tomorrow, Mem?”
On our way back to Galvamand I told them of my efforts to cross-examine Simme, which I thought completely foolish and fruitless; but they, and later the Waylord, listened intently. They remarked on Simme’s apparent lack of knowledge or interest when I spoke indirectly of the Night Mouth, and on his saying he had heard that the new Gand of Gands might recall the army to Asudar.
“Did he say anything about Iddor?” Gryasked. “I didn’t know how to ask.”