The dagger flashed down. The dancers screamed again. The Bull-man laid the dagger aside, lifted the goat’s head by one horn and held it clear of the slab, and with his other hand took the cup and held it so that the blood streamed into the bowl. The bowl steamed. He dropped the goat’s head, gripped the bowl by its stem and raised it towards the sky. The screams grew louder, shriller. He lowered the bowl to his mouth and drank. Still screaming the dancers rushed forward. He flung what was left in the bowl over them, and they fought to lick it from each other’s bodies until he tossed the dead goat among them, and then climbed onto the Bloodstone and towered over them while they scrabbled to and fro, a mass of bloody limbs and bodies, fighting like a pack of starving dogs to tear the carcass to pieces with their bare hands and then gnawing at the tatters they had managed to wrench from it, skin, offal and all.
All the time the monstrous figure on the Bloodstone seemed to grow huger.
Yanni watched for a moment, disgust and terror swirling inside him, and turned away.
“Let’s go home,” he muttered.
He barely noticed how he got to the gate. His legs carried him. Scops showed him the way. He let himself in, woke Euphanie, and sitting in the dark at the end of her bed with Scops still on his shoulder, told her what he had seen. After a little while she climbed out of the sheets, wrapped a blanket round herself and sat beside him, cradling him and he her against the terrors of the dark while he finished his story. She carried her clothes into the kitchen, lit both lamps, and dressed while he sat staring at the tabletop. Every now and then he would remember some detail and mutter it to her. But again and again he returned to the behaviour of the goat, its torpor, the way it didn’t struggle or try to escape.
“Goats aren’t like that!” he said
“They’d drugged it?” Euphanie suggested.
“I suppose so.”
Neither wanted—neither dared—to go back to their rooms and lie in the dark, alone, so to get themselves through the small hours Yanni scrubbed the floor and cleaned the stove and Euphanie went through all her cupboards, sorting out her stores, reminding herself of what she had and what she still needed to lay in for the winter. Together they cleared the shelves and cleaned all they had, down to the smallest egg-cup. By dawn the kitchen was spotless.
This was just as well, because soon after sunrise they heard the rattle of the gate. Scops flew up onto a beam and tucked herself out of sight, and with a sick feeling and a thundering heart Yanni opened to door to see who had come.
Three men and a woman, none of them islanders, stood on the track. Two of the men were some sort of servants, carrying bundles of rolled parchment. The third, by his dress, was an official. He took a roll from one of the others, opened it and came down the path, running a finger down a list and stopping at a line.
“The Philippes holding?” he asked. “The previous census, twenty-two years ago, listed one man, one woman, and one infant daughter.”
“Oh . . .well . . . my father and mother are dead,” said Yanni, stammering with relief. “The baby must have been my sister. I was born after the census. I’m Yanni Philippes.”
“Excellent. I will record the household details later. But now, while the day is still cool, I will go round your holding and recheck the boundaries, and you can tell me of any changes in the nature of the holding since the previous census.”
“My sister had better do that,” said Yanni. “She knows much more about it than I do.”
The official frowned—Yanni was a man, and therefore legally the master of the household—but nodded and turned to the two servants to sort out the rolls he would need. The woman came drifting past them, unnoticed.
“May I come in?” she said in a soft voice. “I like to travel, so I come with my brother on these tours, but now I am tired from the climb and would like to rest.”
Yanni stood aside to let her pass. Euphanie had been listening just inside. The woman acknowledged her curtsey with a smiling nod. She was short and plump, grey-haired, and wore a soft grey travelling cloak clasped at the neck with an ivory brooch carved with the head of a woman who had a tangle of writhing serpents instead of hair.
“You must go with my brother,” she told Euphanie. “Check the clerks’ work, every line. Sometimes they have been known to cheat, and acquire land for themselves.”
Euphanie curtseyed again and left. As soon as the door closed behind her, Scops glided down and settled on the visitor’s wrist. The visitor seemed to change, but not in any way Yanni could have put words to. Her eyes were very strange, both grey and green, not a mixture of those two colours nor one flecked with the other, but a clear soft grey and a soft olive green, both at the same time. The kitchen throbbed with her presence.
Realising whose presence that was, Yanni fell to his knees.
“Help us, please help us!” he gasped.
“That is why I have come,” said the woman. “May I sit here? And you in your own chair. But first, if you will, bring me some water, and a corner of your sister’s last baking, and a little of your oil. Don’t be afraid of me, Yanni. I have very little power. What you are looking at is no more than the ghost of a god, lingering on in a place where she was once loved and feared. My thanks.”
She passed her free hand over the loaf he had brought and broke off a corner, and laid two fingers briefly on the oil flask before pouring a little oil into the dish he had put in front of her. She dipped her bread into the oil, let it soak a few seconds, and ate, chewing like any ordinary woman. It was bad manners on the island not to share the food you offered to your guest, so hesitantly Yanni took a little for himself. The terrible night had left his mouth sour and dry. He wouldn’t have thought he could taste anything, but instantly his palate cleared, and he realised that he would never again eat bread so light, so flavourful, so crisp-crusted, so soft inside, nor oil so subtly sweet.
The goddess smiled.
“I still have a few small powers,” she said. “Now, about why I have come. I saw what you saw last night through the eyes of Scops, and I will tell you what it meant. There have always been forces, powers, energies—but there are no words for them because they do not participate in the dimensions of time and space, so that even the word ‘always’ is wrong for their mode of existence. But they pervade all universes, all the multiplicity of possible dimensions, and in all of those there is a pressure from these forces to be embodied into the realities of each place. Here in this world, the pressure works through the human imagination. It was people who long ago embodied me into the dimensions of here and now.
“Think of lamplight beaming out into the night from a lit window. Now think, if you can, of the light travelling the other way, beaming in from those shadowy spaces and gathering itself into the central lamp, creating a single intense brightness. That is how people create the gods. They take their faint perceptions of these ungraspable forces and beam them in to a single focus in the here and now, and the god becomes real, and full of the previously unrealised powers of the many, many people who have made it. I am the ghost of such a god, all that is left after people have withdrawn their imaginations from me, apart from a funny little superstition here and there. I can exist as a ghost on this island, partly because no islander would willingly harm a scops owl, though most of them do not know why this is so.
“But the forces from which I and my kind originate are mixed, negative and positive; and the people are mixed too, and embody these differences into darkness and light, joy and grief, hope and despair, love and cruelty. So that is how I and my kind were, mixtures. As I told you, even on this island I was both loved and feared. Now, somehow there has grown up among humans, especially around this inland sea, a longing for oneness, a single source of creation, a single explanation for all the different lesser explanations, a single god. And human reason told them that whereas gods of my kind can be balanced against each other, so that the whimsical caprice of one can be mitigated by the benevolence of another, a single god cannot. A god of my kind is a god as he or she might be. But a single god must be as a god ought to be, a god of light, and love, and justice. So your new god is embodied by the imaginations of reason to be these things.