After a while, she wept softly, and told him that indeed she had a son, a good kind lad of about Yuli’s age, Usilk by name. But Usilk had been taken from her by the police for a crime she knew he had never committed. Every night, she lay awake and thought of him, concealed in one of those terrifying places in the Holies, guarded by phagors, and wondered if she would ever see him again.
“The militia and the priests are so unjust here,” Yuli whispered to her. “My people have little to live on in the wilds, but all are equal, one with another, in the face of the cold.”
After a pause, Tusca said, “There are people in Pannoval, women as well as men, who do not learn the scriptures and think to overthrow those who rule. Yet without our rulers, we should be destroyed by Akha.”
Yuli peered at the outline of her face through the dark. “And do you think that Usilk was taken … because he wanted to overthrow the rulers?”
In a low voice she replied, holding tightly to his hand, “You must not ask such questions or you’ll meet trouble. Usilk was always rebellious—yes, perhaps he got among the wrong people…”
“Stop your chatter,” Kyale called. “Get back to your bed, woman—and you to yours, Yuli.”
These things Yuli nursed in himself all the while he went through his sessions with Sataal. Outwardly, he was obedient to the priest.
“You are not a fool, even if you are a savage—and that we can change,” said Sataal. “Soon you shall progress to the next step. For Akha is the god of earth and underground, and you shall understand something of how the earth lives, and we in its veins. These veins are called land-octaves, and no man can be happy or healthy unless he lives along his own land-octaves. Slowly, you can acquire revelation, Yuli. Maybe, if you are good enough, you could yourself become a priest, and serve Akha in a greater way.”
Yuli kept his mouth shut. It was beyond his ability to tell the priest that he needed no particular attentions from Akha: his whole new way of life in Pannoval was a revelation.
The days followed one another peacefully. Yuli became impressed with the never varying patience of Sataal, and began disliking his instruction periods less. Even away from the priest, he thought about his teaching. All was fresh and curiously exciting. Sataal had told him that certain priests, who undertook to fast, were able to communicate with the dead, or even with personages in history; Yuli had never heard of such things, but hesitated to call them nonsense.
He took to roving alone through the suburbs of the city, until its thick shadows took on for him colours of familiarity. He listened to people, who often talked of religion, or to the sayers who spoke at street corners, who often laced their stories with religion.
Religion was the romance of the darkness, as terror had been of the Barriers, where tribal drums warded off devils. Slowly, Yuli began to perceive in religious talk not a vacuum but a core of truth: the way in which people lived and died had to be explained. Only savages needed no explanation. The perception was like finding an animal’s trail in the snow.
Once he was in a malodorous part of Prayn, where human scumble was poured into long trenches on which the noctiferous crops grew. Here, the people were pretty tough, as the saying had it. A man with short-cropped free-flowing hair, and therefore neither a priest nor a sayer, ran up and jumped onto a scumble barrow.
“Friends,” he said, standing before them. “Listen to me for a moment, will you? Just stop your labours and hear what I have to say. I speak not for myself but for the great Akha, whose spirit moves inside me. I have to speak for him although I put my life in danger, for the priests distort Akha’s words for their own purposes.”
People stopped to listen. Two tried to make a joke at the young man’s expense, but the others stood in submissive interest, Yuli included.
“Friends, the priests say that we have to sacrifice to Akha and nothing more, and he will then keep us safe in the great heart of his mountain. I say that is a lie. The priests are content and do not care how we the ordinary people suffer. Akha tells you through my lips that we should do more. We should be better in ourselves. Our lives am too easy—once we have made sacrifices and paid taxes, we care nothing. We merely enjoy, or go to the games. You hear so often that Akha cares nothing for us and everything for his battle with Wutra. We must make him care—we must become worthy of his care. We must reform ourselves! Yes, reform! And the easy- living priests must reform themselves also…”
Someone called to say that the militia were coming.
The young man paused. “My name is Naab. Remember what I say. We too have a role in the great war between Sky and Earth. I will be back to speak if I can—speak my message to all Pannoval. Reform, reform!—Before it is too late …” As he jumped down, there was a surge among the crowd that had gathered. A great tethered phagor rushed forward, with a soldier at the other end of his leash. It reached forward and grabbed Naab’s arm with its powerful horned hands. He gave a cry of pain, but a hairy white arm went round his throat and he was led away in the direction of Market and the Holies.
“He shouldn’t have said such things,” a grey man muttered, as the crowd dispersed.
Yuli followed the man on impulse, and grasped his sleeve.
“The man Naab said nothing against Akha—why should the militia take him away?”
The man looked furtively about. “I recognise you. You’re a savage, or you wouldn’t ask such stupid things.”
For answer, Yuli raised his fist. “I’m not stupid or I would not ask my question.”
“If you weren’t stupid, you’d keep quiet. Who do you think has power here? The priesthood, of course. If you speak out against them—”
“But that’s Akha’s power—”
The grey man had slipped away into the dark. And there in that dark, that ever watchful dark, could be felt the presence of something monstrous. Akha?
One day, a great sporting event was to be held in Reck. It was then that Yuli, acclimatised to Pannoval, underwent a remarkable crystalisation of emotion. He hurried along to the sports with Kyale and Tusca. Fat lamps burned in niches, leading the way from Vakk to Reck, and crowds of people climbed through the narrowing rock passages, struggled up the worn steps, calling to one another, as they filed into the sports arena.
Carried along by the surge of humanity, Yuli caught a sudden view ahead of the chamber of Reck, its curved walls flickering with light. He saw but a slice of the chamber to begin with, trapped between the veined walls of the passage along which the rabble had to pass. As he moved, so into that framed distant view moved Akha himself, high above the heads of the crowd.
He ceased to listen to what Kyale was saying. Akha’s gaze was on him; the monstrous presence of the dark was surely made visible.
Music played in Reck, shrill and stimulating. It played for Akha. There Akha stood, broad and horrible of brow, its large stone eyes unseeing yet all-seeing, lit from below by flares. Its lips dripped disdain.
The wilderness held nothing like this. Yuli’s knees were weak. A powerful voice inside him, one he scarcely recognised as his own, exclaimed, “Oh, Akha, at last I believe in you. Yours is the power. Forgive me, let me be your servant.”
Yet alongside the voice of one longing to enslave himself was another, speaking simultaneously in a more calculating manner. It said, “The people of Pannoval must understand a great truth which it would be useful to get to comprehend by following Akha.”
He was astonished at the confusion within himself, a war that did not lessen as they entered the chamber and more of the stone god was revealed. Naab had said, “Humans have a role in the war between Sky and Earth.” Now he could feel that war alive within him.