Zarqa heaved a deep sigh and his face fell slowly forward until his long, pointed jaw rested on his bony knees. Immense purple eyes solemn with melancholy, the ageless Kalood brooded in the stillness of the night, remembering with a strange warmth mingled with sadness the quick, bright, daring youth who had rescued him from the prison of Sarchimus the Wise, and had offered him the precious gift of friendship.
Sunrise on the world of the giant trees is a slow and gradual thing, an affair of imperceptible degrees of lightening. The vast orb of emerald radiance that is the Green Star, whose name I shall never know, rises behind a thick veil of silvery clouds—clouds by which the shafts of burning jade-green light are diffused into a common and sourceless brilliance. By delicate graduations the light of the Green Star suffuses the cloudy heavens into a dim, rich luminance.
Dawn, thus, was upon Zarqa the Kalood before he was fully aware of the gradual illumination. But when at last he perceived that it was day, he rose, refreshed himself with a brief sip from the stores of golden syrup that were all the sustenance he would require for years, and went to rouse his companions.
They broke their fast on a frugal meal. Before they had left the Scarlet Pylon of Sarchimus the Wise in the Dead City of Sotaspra, Zarqa, Janchan, and Karn the Hunter had stored provisions for their journey aboard the sky-sled. These stores consisted of preserved meats, dried fruits, a jug or two of resinous red wine, loaves of coarse but singularly nutritious black bread, and several canteens of fresh water, as well as supplies of the golden syrup on which Zarqa infrequently fed. In the interval between the departure from the Dead City and this dawn, a matter of slightly more than two weeks, these supplies had necessarily dwindled. There were enough supplies left to assuage their hunger and thirst, however, but before long it would be needful to kill fresh game and procure fruits, nuts, or berries from the trees of the forest.
Arjala complained fretfully over the Spartan simplicity of their morning meal. The Goddess customarily broke her fast on a superb repast of delicately spiced sausage, honey-cakes, sugared melon, brandied whipped cream, and an astringent white liqueur which savored of anise.
“Why, this is food for peasants—fodder for slaves!” she fumed, refusing to accept another bite. Prince Janchan shrugged good humoredly.
“As you wish, Goddess. All the more for the princess and I, in that case.” But Arjala was not amused.
“We of the Heavenly lineage are not accustomed to dining on sustenance of such crudity. As befits our nearness to the Divine, our senses and our being are more highly refined and attenuated, in comparison with the grosser breeds. We require a more elegant and subtler fare—which you must supply, noble. I will starve if I must endure another meal of this nature.”
“Starve, then, if it pleases you,” the prince said affably. “For we can supply no daintier cuisine than that spread before you; and by tomorrow, we shall have to hunt and kill in order to have meat…”
The Goddess was too appalled at the thought to be offended by his easy shrug.
” ‘Meat’—meat?” she gasped, paling. “Do-you-expect-me-to devour raw meat, like—like a—a savage?” They eyed her with amusement, exchanging a wicked glance of mischief.
“Alas, I fear we must stoop to it, Goddess.” Janchan smiled. “I should think you would find it a refreshing change, after all those rich spices and precious sauces. And we shan’t exactly rip our meat all raw and dripping from the bone, you know. I think we shall be able to manage a bit of a fire, with luck, and char just the outer portions of the gory, steaming flesh a bit.”
The Goddess gulped, turned sickly green, and almost lost what small share of the breakfast she had been able to down. Then she waxed eloquent on the bestial and sub human lineage of her captors, and the loathsome and degrading manner in which they forced her to subsist on food little better than stinking offal.
Janchan began to lose his own temper. It was one thing to go along with the voluptuous but ill-humored priestess who amused him with her pretense of divinity in which, apparently, she devoutly believed. But one could endure her airs only up to a point, and he was near that point.
“Oh, do stop your whining and complaining, Arjala! You begin to sound like a spoiled child, instead of a mature woman of breeding, character, and intelligence. The food we have to share may not be worthy of a prince’s table, much less a Goddess’, but it is all we have, and it is not only edible and nourishing, but not unflavorful. Remember, you insisted on coming along with us, when I would have let you dismount in the tree next to that wherein Ardha is built. Having elected to share our lot, it ill befits you now to whimper so.”
Arjala was so astounded at being upbraided by a mere mortal that she almost forgot to be angry. Never in her entire life had she been spoken to in so blunt and unsympathetic a manner, and the sensation was thoroughly beyond her experience.
Always before she had been addressed with obsequious and suave flattery, by underlings and inferiors who, themselves raised in the same system, accepted without really thinking about it her Divine status and their own lowly place in the hierarchy. Now this mere noble, this ordinary aristocrat, this young man whose very lineage and ancestry were unknown to her, had the almost inconceivable effrontery to address her in so rude and inconsiderate a manner. The experience was so new to her that she hardly knew how to deal with it. So she stuttered and stammered, flustered and looking foolish—and, what was even worse, knowing that she looked foolish.
And then Niamh added the crowning injury to the insult she had already endured.
“Yes, do try to make the best of things, dear. As for the food, well, it may be hardier than you or I are accustomed to, but it is agreeable and even palatable. And, remember, dear, my digestive processes are every bit as close to Divinity as are your own?”
Arjala turned on the younger woman a gaze of speechless indignation. Niamh smiled merrily.
“Oh, didn’t you know? I, too, am the Goddess Incarnate. We are spiritual sisters, dear… but I doubt if our Divine cousins of The World Above are very likely to rescue either of us from our perils.”
Unable to think of a fitting rejoinder to this ultimate affront, Arjala turned on her heel and sat awkwardly, with her back to her companions. She had been aware, in a hazy fashion, that the Goddess reigned over the Temple in every Laonese city, incarnate in a different fleshly vessel in each dominion. But she had never really thought about it before, since the various cities of the forest world had very little commerce with each other. She knew that in the Jewel City of Phaolon the rival factions of Throne and Temple had resolved their differences a generation or so ago, through intermarriage between the Incarnate Goddess of that era and the temporal monarch. Thus both Throne and Temple were mingled in the solitary person of Niamh the Fair, the present queen—and also the current avatar of the Goddess in Phaolon.
But there is a difference between being aware of this situation as a vague part of one’s general knowledge of the world, and in having the truth brought, so to speak, right beneath your nose. Arjala would dearly have loved to have been able to give the lie to Niamh’s outrageous claim to be the Incarnate Goddess of Phaolon. The trouble was that she could not, for she knew it was true. She stole a furtive glance over her shoulder at the two. Niamh and Janchan, ignoring her presence, sat chatting and laughing together, drinking with apparent relish the harsh red wine that had burned her throat, and sharing between them the coarse dry bread she had found bitter, and the spiced preserved meats that had almost made her nauseous.