In the Ruins (Crown of Stars #6)

In the Ruins (Crown of Stars #6) Page 191

It always struck her as strange that, while some in the communities welcomed this relief, others were made uneasy by it. When she called an end to the council, she saw the blood knives circulate out among the gathered council, whispering and plotting. All left her, so she was alone in the chamber, with a mat for sleeping and four strips of cloth hung from the post and lintel doorframe to give her privacy. The walls had been recently plastered and a painting begun on one wall, depicting the long march through the shadows with the sacred animals standing guard overhead.

“You must rest,” said White Feather, bringing the babies back for another feeding.

Feather Cloak’s son played the flute in a restful way, and out in the courtyard an unseen woman was grinding grain into flour in a soothing rhythm, but Feather Cloak could not find calm in her heart.

“Most of the blood knives must have stayed behind in the land, while these few walked out into the world,” she mused. “Yet I never knew any blood knives. They were all gone by the time I was a child. And you, my elders, never speak of them.”

White Feather looked at the mural, the images picked out with charcoal but only a few places colored in. The room was dim because night was coming. “They were weaker than our enemies. They could not help us. They cried to the gods and wanted to follow the old ways in exile, when it was obvious to everyone by then that the old ways would kill us.” Her voice grew tight and her jaw rigid. “That the old ways did kill us.”

“We no longer live in exile,” said Feather Cloak.

“It is difficult to leave exile. Even when you have come home. Especially when you have come home.”

For all of Feather Cloak’s life, the city on the lake had lain deserted although in the days before exile it had been the greatest city in the land which was at that time called Abundance-Is-Ours-If-The-Gods-Do-Not-Change-Their-Minds. When she was a young child, there had still been a few marshy areas through which a girl and her age mates might search for scrumptious frogs and crunchy insects, but by the time she had given birth to her first child even these wet depressions had dried out and the lakebed become a haven for nothing except a few inedible weeds and precious stands of hardy sap cactus.

Now, of course, after winter rains and spring rains, the lake had disgorged its share of the returning waters. She asked her bearers to halt on the causeway. From the height of the litter, she gazed over stretches of unbroken water rimmed by brilliant bursts of green where reeds and grasses burgeoned along the current shoreline. Vast flocks of birds of every description, most of them kinds she had never seen, ranged on the waters, clucking and wheedling and croaking and whistling each in their own tongue, and insects buzzed and chirred and in general made a nuisance of themselves. She-Who-Creates was busy!

The farmers had dug their canals out beyond that shoreline, figuring that the lake would continue to grow, although naturally no one had any idea if it would ever refill the old basin, or grow beyond it. Most of the adult population was out there today building more fields out of dirt and mud, or tending to young plants waxing in earth planted and tended over the last few months.

He-Who-Burns showed his face intermittently. Those who had walked in the shadows told her that in the days before there came for certain months of the year a time with rain, and after that a time when He-Who-Burns baked the Earth with his blazing fire. There were two seasons, together with the passages between them, tied to the equinox. It was still early in the year, in the time of rains when all things grew, watered both within and without in the field that is Earth. Although the city had lost its abundance during the time of exile, it seemed that after all, having returned to Earth, that the gods had not changed their minds. They still wanted their children to flourish, to make a new home all over again.

“Feather Cloak! You are too bold!”

“Feather Cloak! You must not let the noonday sun touch you!”

“Feather Cloak! You were to approach on the eastern causeway. This is the causeway for merchants and artisans!”

“Feather Cloak! Have you come to begin work on restoring the temples? All else means nothing if the proper rituals are not observed!”

“How are you come to leave the sacred precinct in the Heart-of-the-World’s-Beginning? Who allowed this to happen, in this month? It was not the proper time!”

The blood knives, the ones who had set up residence in the temple in the center of the city on the lake, had seen her coming. They swarmed like wasps out along the causeway to meet her, and to castigate her. She fanned herself with a fan built of green-and-gold feathers, the mark of the most holy bird sacred to She-Who-Creates, and because of this gesture they fell silent according to their own laws and their own customs.