The two years that had passed since he came here had seen the drought harden on the land, streams dry up, the River sink until the sandbars showed. Grass was dry and brittle; most of the brush was dead.
He walked without hurrying, his long easy strides taking him across the land with deceptive speed; he could walk all day now without tiring, swinging the staff, chanting Chumavayal’s Law or meditating as he moved.
An hour before sundown he searched for food, found a few meaty beetles and some withered tungah roots. He made a small fire, roasted the beetles and the roots, ate them with a stolid indifference, washed the food down with two swallows from the skin. He poured sand over the fire and stamped it down to smother the tiniest embers, then he slept.
On the third day he came to a scrub farm, deserted and silent.
There was a dead cow in a rickety corral, all ribs and skin, mummified by the heat and dryness.
Swaying listlessly in the desert wind, a short frayed length of rope hung from the end of a cracking well-sweep. When he reached its mudbrick coping, he dropped a pebble into the well. After a while he heard a clatter, no splash. Dry. Deep and dry.
He sighed. Dropping to his knees and stretching his arms wide, he chanted Chumavayal’s Blessing on the land and its people. He kept up the cycle of prayer until his mouth was dryer than the dust, his throat was raw and his lips cracking-until he felt Chumavayal’s touch on his brow.
He took a swallow of water from the skin, held it in his mouth for several minutes, then let it trickle down his throat. Another sip, then he slapped the stopple home and started on his journey once again.
On the fifth day he came to a dry canal and followed it to a village. Three men sitting on a bench in the meager shade of a dead tree looked up as he stopped beside them.
“The fields are empty,” he said. “Where are your children?”
“Crops ha’ fail again, Prophet,” one of them told him, an unlettered Naostam he was, his ancient hands twisted and knotted by a lifetime’s hard labor. He jerked his thumb at the canal. “Y’ see how that be. No crop ‘thout water. Nothin to keep ’em here. Mal Rostocar, he send rations for the old ’uns, s’ we starve slow ‘stead o fast, but the young ’uns got to do fer theysefs.”
“Do you have any kassos here? Abosoa? Adjoa? Anachoa?”
The old men snorted, slapped their knees, and hid toothless smiles behind withered hands. The one who’d spoken before said, “Last well he go dry, suckin yungis run like they’s tail on fire.”
Faharmoy shifted his grip on his staff, frowned. “Do you have ghosts that need laying?”
The speaker shrugged. “They’s good folk, don’ bother us.”
Faharmoy scowled at the ancient, defiant faces. There was nothing he could do here; these men were like stones, they wouldn’t hear anything he said. He shook his head and started on. Clean the heart of the corruption and the body would have its health again, but as long as there was poison in the cities, there was nothing he could do for the land.
He walked through other villages, some with other old men sitting on benches talking about other old times, some empty except for the wind and now and then ghost fragments that he chanted to rest before passing on.
The fields were empty and slowly blowing away with the furnace wind. The canals that watered this once productive land were dry, even the dead fish stranded in them were so old there was no stink left, only tatters of gray-brown skin and arrangements of delicate white bone.
› › ‹ ‹
On his eleventh day of walking, he came to the River and followed it east to the city, which he reached late in the afternoon.
The Sequba Cloudbrushers in the Abey groves were green and pleasant in the burnt land; their roots were set so deep that droughts never troubled them. There were many of these groves scattered about the Low City, Abeyhamal’s Chapels the Edgers called them. He saw them as centers of poison and corruption, seducers with their green and their shade. He circled wide about the first of them, careful that even the shadow of a tree didn’t touch him. “You will burn,” he murmured as he passed among the buildings. “You are perversion and will be destroyed.”
Heat wavered up from the dead grass and the hardpan; sunlight glinted painfully off glass in windows whose shutters had been unbarred for the first time in centuries. They were here, all those farmers who’d abandoned the land and with it their proper roles, their needful communion with the Iron God, they were here in defiance of Chumavayal’s Law and of the Amrapake’s command. This must be made right.
Shadow from a wall touched him and he flinched away as if he’d been brushed by nettles. Evil.
He saw no one, but he could feel eyes on him-unseen folk in those newly opened houses peering at him from behind improvised curtains.
He moved through the Low City to the ancient Sok Circle at its heart and knelt in the dust there, his arms outstretched, his eyes closed.
After a while he heard whispers, coughs, the scraping of feet against the dusty paving stones, the rustle of cloth and a hundred other small sounds as the squatters came warily from the houses they’d appropriated and stood in a ring around the outside of the Circle. He heard them, but paid no attention to them. They were just there. Like the wind Like the sun’s heat. He was touching, tasting, getting to know the ills of this place. He wasn’t strong enough to destroy it, not yet, but he could make a start.
He filled his lungs, expelled the air in a braying raucous cry: CHUMAVAYAL!
Eyes still squeezed shut, he felt heat brushing at his skin, then leaving him, rushing away. In his mind it was a hollow sphere of sunfire racing away from him, eating up everything it touched.
He heard screams, curses, a brief hiss of fire, then silence.
He was cold, weary. The God was gone from him. He opened his eyes.
The walls that faced the Circle bloomed with black char; shutters were gone, baring unglazed windows like holes in skulls. In some of the kariams that led like spokes from the Circle, there were piles of rags, charred flesh, and bone.
He got to his feet, his movements slow, laborious.
From a throat scraped raw, his strained voice dropping flat against the pitted walls, he declaimed, “This place is anathema. I call upon it plague and pestilence. I declare that those who come here are corrupt and guilty. I declare that as long as there is a living soul within these walls, the drought and death will continue. I am the WORD of Chumavayal, HEAR ME! I say what HE has given me to say. HEAR ME! I am the SCOURGE of Chumavayal. Refuse my word and die.”
He shook out his robe, ticked his hands in his sleeves and walked from the center of the Sok Circle; with an approving glance at the black burns on the wall beside him, he stepped over a pile of ash and bone in the mouth of a kariam and started for the Iron Bridge.
Chapter 11. Honcychild Joins The Dance
Faan drew the back of her hand across her forehead, dropped the scrub brush on the tiles, and made a face at the two inches of filthy water in the bucket. Whatever else had to wait on water, the Kassian Tai insisted on keeping the altar clean and the tiles around it. And the cleaning had to be done properly. When it was her turn, Faan couldn’t spell the dust away; she had to get on hands and knees and scrub.
Ailiki was curled up under the altar, head on her foreleg, twitching as she dreamed. “Aili my Liki, you have the right idea there, sleep the heat away. Trouble is, if I try that, I wake up with a head stuffed with rocks.” She laughed as the mahsar opened one bright eye, closed it again, made a sound like a word. “Potz? T’t t’t, child, where you picking up that language? As if I didn’t know. Hunh. I wonder if you really are learning to talk. Tai says you’re magic from your nose to your tail. My familiar. Whatever that is.” She reached for the brush and went back to scrubbing at the tiles.
Despite the heat and the withering of the pot plants, there were a few bees buzzing lazily about. One landed on the rim of the bucket, seemed to sniff at the gummy water and reject it. It looked up at her, faceted black eyes glittering…