Gin and hot baths, they seemed to be the entirety of her book of healing. Well, that and stitches. Definitely my kind of woman.
On my third morning, the lentils did not satisfy, and my own laziness was beginning to irritate me. When restfulness became a problem, it was no longer a solution, as the Lily Blades liked to say. I rose, gathered my belled silk and adjusted my boy’s clothing, then headed out to find better fare. I needed to be well-fed before I could square accounts with my ox god. The baby did not seem to mind, and my appetite was drawn to the crackling smell of sausages on a fire nearby.
“Mother Green!” said a cheerful young man who looked Selistani and sounded Stone Coast. He appeared vaguely familiar-one of the drawers of water for my bath two days ago? He also held a large, flat pan covered with the sizzling meat.
“I am no one’s mother,” I snapped. Not true, of course. And it was better than “Lady Green.” “But I have a mother of a hunger.”
“Take a place.” He pointed to a long wide wooden table under a thin canvas roof where a dozen young people, mixed Selistani and Petraean, sat wearing undyed linen robes, chattering happily as they ate their way through scrambled eggs, sausage, and chunks of brown bread.
This was so utterly unlike the refectory at the Temple of the Silver Lily that I had to gawk a moment. All the aspirants there had lived with intense discipline, not just the Blades. Here the atmosphere was more that of a fair, or a camp. Children playing at ritual for a lark, not serious acolytes. Not at all like my poor Septio had been, either.
I shook off my mood and laughed. “Sit? No. You sit!” I gently shoved him aside from his pan and took over the cooking. They had a decent selection of spices, and I called for cheese and white wine to enrich the eggs. If only I could have remade the bread…
A hot stove in front of me, a pan in my hands-these things much improved my spirit. Cooking absorbed my energy and calmed my spirit awhile. I fed Endurance’s young acolytes until I could resist the smell no more, then loaded my own crockery plate and found a place among them while the boy resumed cooking, somewhat educated and chastened both.
I ate so much that eventually most of the acolytes stopped talking and watched me shovel food in. The baby seemed happy, and so did my stomach. I would not waste the opportunity.
Finally I pushed aside my fifth serving. The young cook began to clap. After an embarrassed moment, the rest of them did so, too. There was nothing for it but to rise and take my bow. At least I was properly fed. “I have been called before the god,” I told them, and headed off through the tents toward the small wooden temple.
As I walked past the foundation markers of Chowdry’s larger ambitions-for I was sure Endurance did not so much care about his temple-I realized what my friend the priest had meant about the god calling him. Two days I’d lain in my tent, but when it was time to rise and go forth, I had risen and gone forth unquestioningly.
I stopped at the front, still not quite ready to mount the steps. The facade was a very plain, rough-ripped wood framed up competently enough. The interior would be cold in winter, for there was no chinking between the planks, and I did not think they had placed anything behind it. I wondered if Chowdry planned to lay a course of bricks or daub-and-wattle over the exposed wood.
“Enough,” I said aloud as I slipped my cloak of bells over my shoulder. How else to approach the ox that had carried my grandmother to her funeral at the beginning of my days? I had nothing to be afraid of.
Did I?
That answer came to me as I mounted the steps: Endurance had been Papa’s ox. Not mine. Somehow I was returning to the presence of my father, who’d sold me as a girl, and must have died long since of whatever rotting of the mind had already claimed him when I’d found him once more these four years past.
The image of Shar, his second wife, sprang unbidden to my mind. So ragged, so afraid of me.
With that thought, I passed within, the music of my birthplace jingling with each stride. The doorway was obscured by a curtain of beads. The room beyond could have held thirty or forty close-packed worshippers at most, and smelled of incense and people’s feet. This was the whole of it-there was no space for priestly chambers or tiring rooms or secret dungeons. A life-sized marble statue of an ox kneeling on the ground occupied the far end, opposite the door. Straw scattered about the ox and the rough beams over my head finally cued me to the nature of this temple.
It was a stable.
Endurance’s followers had put him in a stable.
I had to laugh at that as I approached the statue. Back in the half-remembered days of my youth, Endurance had lived outside. By the time of my ill-fated visit four years ago, someone had built the ox a small hut to shelter in. But a stable?
Ribbons had been tied to the ox horns. Some had slips of paper dangling from them, others curls of ash. I leaned forward and turned a scrap in my hands. help aunt jem for her crab disese
Prayers, then. Given most directly to the god. Some sped on their way with a little offering of flame. Narrow, long trays of sand held dozens of burnt incense sticks just below the statue’s nose. That struck me as a bit odd-I did not think that Copper Downs worshipped so. This was a Selistani god. Plates of fruit and dried-up bread were scattered among the incense holders, around the god’s knees.
I settled into a comfortable tailor’s seat. The belled silk gathered around my thighs and flowed to the floor at my back. In this place I did not even have my short knives, but Endurance was not the Lily Goddess. My offerings to him were drawn neither from strength nor violence.
This god I had seen in direct manifestation, the day we had brought down Choybalsan and poor Federo. I knew Endurance. He had risen unbidden from my own memories to take form in a numinous moment of theogeny.
Closing my eyes, I leaned forward until the top of my head rested against the nose of the ox. I let the smell of incense and feet-and this close to the fane, rotting fruit-wash around me.
The heat came first. Those halcyon days of my earliest youth, when the sunlight was a hammer to smash flat anyone’s ambitions. I felt it pass through me like fire through a hay barn.
I strained for the smells that went with that heat. Scorched air. The dank water of the rice paddies. Clay banks at the edges. Plantains and bougainvillea. Ox dung. My father’s musky sweat.
When I found those I began to weep. Pinarjee, Shar had said his name was Pinarjee, but my father had sold me away, sold away my name and turned his face from me. He’d never even told his second wife of my existence.
A shadow fell upon me. Once again I was small enough to fit beneath the standing ox. The white hair of his flanks met in a troubled gray line like a storm cloud down the center of his belly. I could have reached up and grasped onto it as monkey infants cling to their mother’s fur.
I let the shade protect me from the heat. I let the ox’s earthworn smell protect me from the memories of my father. His solid presence shielded me from all that had passed before and all that was yet to come. Surely he saw better than I, but Endurance did not warn me of the future. Looking back now after all that happened, I suppose I would not have turned away even if he had.
In time-short or long, I could not say-a sense of need began to fill me. Not my need, for I was safe and happy returned for a little while to the last carefree days of my life. The god’s need. The calling that had descended first upon Chowdry, then me.
Without words I knew I was Endurance’s champion. The god was not jealous of my oaths to the Lily Goddess across the Storm Sea. They simply did not signify to him here in this place. He had warded me, and I would ward him.
“From what?” I asked, the words escaping my lips.