by Don McQuinn
Violent, racking shivers slammed through Moonpriest’s body. He fell into trancelike sleep. The corner of a new moon pierced the horizon.
Chapter 16
After a cautious approach to Moonpriest’s resting place, the Windband escort stopped in dread. Moonpriest lay utterly still beside the unmoving Saris. One of the nomads groaned.
The leader of the group rammed an admonishing elbow to the midsection of the complainer. Fear drove the blow too hard; the complainer staggered back.
Another nomad said, “Moonpriest lives. The grass at his mouth moves with his breath.”
The leader edged closer.
Moonpriest was curled in a fetal position. His chin pressed hard against his fists. Aside from the dead white hands, his color seemed all right. Deliberately, the leader scuffled a boot across the gritty soil. The noise had no effect on Moonpriest. Coughing was equally unsuccessful. So was calling that grew louder until it approached shouting. Desperate, the leader dared to prod Moonpriest’s shoulder.
And leaped back as if burned.
Moonpriest’s eyes flew open, focused uncomprehendingly on those of the leader. Moonpriest mumbled, blinked owlishly. Joints cracking, he rolled to a sitting position. Words croaked harshly. “She came to me. My mother. Spoke.”
Unnerved, the leader stammered apology. His companions stood away from him. To a man, they all clasped their moon disks.
What Moonpriest saw was men hiding behind Moondance’s symbol.
They’d doubted before. He’d seen it. It almost made him sad. How could they hope to understand the honor of being born again as the moon goddess’ only child? They understood nothing. Appreciated nothing. Wasn’t Moonpriest the one who personally prayed over all the plague victims and saved their lives? These men saw others who questioned Moonpriest struck down by the goddess’ lightning. They saw the faithful rattlesnakes kill traitors. Despite plague and battle defeat, Church failed to thwart the true religion; Moondance and Moonpriest still controlled Windband. And these piddling ordinaries thought they could doubt her son, then cower for safety behind a wretched piece of silver.
Moonpriest widened his eyes, hissed, made a rattling noise with his tongue against his teeth. He extended a darting, snake-striking finger, pointing.
The warriors flinched. Moonpriest’s laughter pealed across the new day, sent a small bird into chirping, jerky escape. Sobering, he said, “All will be well. Ordinaries doubt. Gods forgive. If it suits them.”
The term ordinaries lingered in his mind. He turned away from the escort to consider it. It never occurred to him to describe others that way before, yet he’d done it twice already this morning. Immediately on waking from the dream-time with his mother.
How wonderful of her. To give him the exact word, the exact way, to consider those he was reborn to lead.
A nomad’s tight voice collapsed the moment. “Saris lives?”
“Certainly.” Moonpriest turned to examine the wounded River, smothering a grunt when his stiffened limbs objected. Saris’ breathing was no better than before. The pulse fluttered. The awful infection smelled as bad or worse.
Moonpriest steeled himself, pulled aside Saris’ blanket. Gagged, swallowed.
And suddenly realized he had no idea whatever of the instructions his mother gave him in the dream.
Panic struck like ice water falling on him from a clear, untroubled sky. Unable to move or speak, he gobbled inarticulate turkey sounds, flapped his hands in meaningless circles. The nomad warriors retreated in unison.
Lurching to his feet, Moonpriest stumbled away from Saris, from the camp. He howled his misery, tore at his robe, thrashed through scrub growth heedless of scratches or rips in his garment. Only when branches threatened to dislodge his turban did he take notice. He grabbed it, holding it securely to his head. Even in this extreme, he refused to expose the pink nakedness on his skull where Sylah had operated.
When he mustered coherent thought, he cursed the moon goddess. This was worse torment than any physical pain. Women. All alike. Vessels of disappointment. He trusted her. And now this.
He lashed out at the passing brush with his fists. He kicked and wailed.
Slinking from cover to cover like coyotes, his escort followed, whispering to themselves of the wonders of divine madness. The morning was cool, but sweat glistened on them.
Moonpriest stumbled over the goat carcass, sprawling headlong onto all fours. Scrabbling about, blinded by the turban that slipped over his eyes, he managed to flail himself free of it. The first sight to greet him was a pulsing mound of maggots.
Choking, Moonpriest threw himself to the side, staggered to his feet. He backed away from the repulsive mess, hands uselessly pushing against the air. What he couldn’t allow himself to do around Saris he was unable to prevent now. He fell, crawled like a beast, retching until tears wet his cheeks.
The leader of the escort ran to where Moondance sagged, panting, against a large boulder. The man offered water from a brightly painted, incised gourd. The stopper was a grinning skull. Moondance ignored it until he realized the carved material was bone. Then he was reminded of death. The goat. The obscene, squirming life clustered under his nose. His stomach churned.
The nomad took one look at Moondance’s changed expression and fled.
Moondance drank greedily, spat, drank again. Little by little, he felt physical control returning. Filth, Moondance thought; why must he be surrounded by filth? White was his color. Purity. The white of moon, of silver.
The maggots were white.
Moonpriest shuddered, hugged himself, rocked from side to side.
Something whirled across his mind. Something awful. It wouldn’t be identified.
He ground his teeth in frustration. Filth.
Other words, unclear, struggling to surface. Then, with a clarity that made him exclaim for joy, he had them. “From what is foul will come that which is strongest. Utmost purity springs up from meanest desecration. Just so, even an enemy is a wonderful tool in the hands of the skillful.”
The words of his mother. He remembered. There were more.
“Demand excess. Only in excess so catastrophic it destroys can true creation originate. Only in the ruination of excess can humans learn the beauty of moderation. Lead them. Force them. To salvation. To me.”
Moonpriest understood. His love for her humbled him. He dropped to his knees, prayed a quick thanksgiving. Then he hurried back to the campsite. Storming past the befuddled escort, he showered them with orders and curses.
After a swift bath in the river, Moonpriest changed into a fresh robe and attended to Saris. The River was conscious by then. As one of the nomads clumsily spooned dabs of porridge into the man, Moonpriest explained to Saris what must be done. “The bad flesh must go, Saris. It’s full of evil. If that evil claims your body, I lose my grip on your soul. Of all the warriors who fight for me and die and join me in the moon to be reborn again with me, only those who die of evil magic will be denied their rightful place. You must let me cleanse you.”
Saris’ eyes glowed against the gray-blue color of dying. His words crept past pale lips. “What if you fail? What if I die while you try to save me?”
“Then you belong to me. So long as you trust me, I will save the soul, even if I lose the body. But I know I can save that, as well.”
“Help me.” Saris’ clutching hand was a claw.
Moonpriest inhaled deeply, took Saris’ hands in his own. “The sun is sometimes my mother’s fiercest enemy, but we must use him. We must have sunlight on the wound. On the clean wound.”
“Clean? Unseens claim more of my flesh every day, Moonpriest. No man rots like me and lives.” Crystal tears slid along his cheekbones.
Moonpriest took a firmer hold on Saris’ hands. The man was weak unto helplessness, but there was no sense in being careless. “I must arrange for the things that feast on evil to eat the evil.”
Incomprehension kept Saris calm for the space of a heartbeat. Then he was fra
ntic. He struggled valiantly until his paltry energy was expended. He attempted to scream for help, managing a hoarse wheeze. Then, defeated, “You mean maggots.”
“Perhaps it would suit you to let the evil unseens claim your soul. As surely as they’ll claim your life.”
Saris freed his hands, pounded the earth with fists too weak to raise dust. In the end, he turned from Moonpriest, drew his face tight in a mask of disgust and denial. “Save me,” he whispered, hating the words with his voice. “Save my life.”
“You’ll stand at my right hand when I’m called to my mother.” Moonpriest dabbed cool water on Saris’ brow, rose, and stepped back several paces to the waiting escort. He fixed each in turn with a stony gaze. “Do as I say, and we live. Fail me, and your children will be cursed for seven generations. I want no River close enough to see Saris. You, on the end; go to the dead goat. Get a double handful of maggots in a basket and bring them to me. You, the one who brought me the hurtweed; I want more of it. I’ll want more every day.”
The leader asked, “Can you heal him, Moonpriest?”
“I said it, didn’t I? Carry out your orders.”
The escort scattered.
For the next week, Moonpriest slept beside Saris. During the day, he sat with him, supervising his feeding, adjusting his position so the sun had best access to the wounds. Several times a day, Moonpriest bathed the unaffected skin around the injuries. Flies by the thousands landed on his hands, his face, on Saris’ exposed flesh, all volunteering to add to the numbers of maggots. Almost frantically, Moonpriest shooed them off. Some slipped past, nevertheless, and contributed their translucent eggs.
From the very first, Moonpriest forced himself to watch the slimy little creatures go about their revolting work. Concerned only with continuing life, the heaving, liquid-looking mass obliged with gluttonous industry.
Moonpriest was startled and gratified by the rapid improvement in the wounds. Where there had been nothing but rot, clean tissue appeared. The maggots ignored it. Moonpriest constantly dabbed at the exposed good material with a solution made from leaves the herb-wise warrior brought him. Soon there were patches of flesh large enough to be covered by bandages. Gritting his teeth at his proximity to the maggots, Moonpriest regularly massaged the area of the injury. Saris complained of the pain. Moonpriest ignored him; he was sure blood flow was important to the healing.
Several times a day, Moonpriest inspected his tiny herd of helpers for signs of pupation. A twig launched the nonproducers unceremoniously into the surrounding brush. During the night, mouse wars erupted over the unexpected bounty.
Moonpriest had the escort set live traps for the mice. His rattlesnakes gorged in their turn. Fat and content, they were even more docile than normal. When Moonpriest was forced to go to the limit of his camp’s perimeter to meet with yet another of the unending River delegations, he carried the reptiles looped along his outstretched arms. The tongue-darting heads rested on the back of his hands, where gold and jet eyes glittered malignant contempt at all who spoke to Moonpriest.
All things contributed to all other things.
In the long stretches of the night, Moonpriest found himself more and more drawn to contemplation of that concept. Whatever one learned prepared one to learn something more. All contributed to all.
And Sylah and her noxious companions had escaped from a library. Church blathered for generations about “the treasure of the Door,” and in the end, it was mostly vidisks.
Moonpriest wished it had been only vidisks. What could be more useless than video in a place where a wall plug, mined from a long-forgotten city, was nothing more than a source of reusable copper? No one had heard of TV for at least five hundred years.
The Door hid more than vidisks. Books. Sylah had books. She also had six people from the cryogenic crèche who were literate.
Saris was going to live because of knowledge. Divine knowledge in this case, Moonpriest thought, although the secular knowledge of the young herb-wise nomad was welcome.
Continuing to reminisce, Moonpriest considered that when he’d ordered the library behind the Door incinerated, there were two reasons. Primarily, it was to kill Sylah and her companions. The other reason was to destroy any learning not controlled by Moonpriest.
This episode with Saris proved the validity of the second point. The moon made him know the maggots would eliminate the foulness killing Saris. The nomad showed him the herbs that protected the unhealed flesh from further infection.
The fed maggots fed the mice that were fed to the snakes.
All contributed to all. To serve Moonpriest.
In teaching how to heal one insignificant fool, Moonpriest’s mother taught her son the ultimate lesson.
This new, sin-raddled world, with its unending violence and terror, was unready for uncontrolled knowledge. It was wrong that Sylah, that spawn of hypocrite Church, should have access to learning, much less control it. The control of learning was a divine right.
Moonpriest must control.
To control, he must possess. To fully possess, there must be no one to contest him.
Moonpriest scratched names in the dirt at his feet.
Sylah. Conway. Tate. Leclerc. Bernhardt. Carter. Anspach.
Scuffling about in a weird, arrhythmic dance, Moonpriest erased the names. He laughed happily, softly. It was as if they’d never been. As their world and is arrogance were destroyed, so must the impious be.
Obliterated. All.
Chapter 17
Lorso stood with fists clenched on his hips, head back, looking up at the semicircular seating of the men’s council room. Its proper name was the All. It was a name never spoken outside those walls.
Cedar logs of immense girth, set upright in deep graveled trenches, formed the oval building. Directly behind Lorso, the inner sides of ten logs were carved into faces. Half again as tall as a man, each was artfully sculpted in such a way that all appeared to stare at the same jaggedly irregular rectangle of black obsidian. Roughly knee-high and twice that long, the block lay in a curved swath of pure white sand that reached from the base of the wall posts to the first row of the banked seats. The stone was obviously a speaker’s stand.
Lorso, barefoot on the obsidian, was the focus of the audience as well as the frowning glare of the abalone shell eyes of the carvings. Firewood blazed in iron braziers directly in front of each face. Dancing flames sent swirling, changing colors across the iridescent shell. The unblinking eyes lived. Judged.
Lorso ignored the carvings, the false eyes, and the heat of the braziers. The ancestors behind him were long dead, gone to the Deep Calm. Sacrifice on an altar would propitiate them. All forty of the Navigators were here. Alive and angered. If they decided sacrifice was needed, it would be a very different matter.
“It is not enough for Skan warriors to die bravely,” Lorso shouted, loud enough to end the grumbling murmur of the Navigators. He swept the entire curve of the audience with a belligerent stare. “Skan always fight well, die well. Did the Navigators name me Slavetaker so I could send the Skan to die and prove their courage? Where is the man who questions the courage of the Skan? Of me?” He surveyed the listeners again.
A shaven-headed older man in the front row got to his feet with studied deliberation. Lorso protested vainly. “Please, Domel; it’s not necessary to stand. The formality…”
One dignified glance stopped Lorso. Domel said, “Tradition is always important. As I intend to explain.” Domel advanced slowly. The blank expression of the weathered face suggested an inner hard darkness as stark as the obsidian speaking block. At his knees and ankles, tight against embroidered woolen blouse and trousers, were bracelets of clam shells. They were painted in a bright rainbow of colors, all in the geometric patterns of the Skan. Lorso stepped down, into his sandals. Shedding his own similar footwear, Domel took the block. His voice was rough, strong.
“Lorso speaks of the reasons for battle. He should. The Skan sent nearly eight hundred men to destroy t
he Three Territories. They outnumbered the sorry Wolfpack scraps Gan Moondark rounded up to man the walls of his forts. The Three Territories is wounded, bloody from the fight with the Kwa. Yet Slavetaker listened to the boasts of Gan Moondark and called off the attack. The largest force the Skan ever sent to war failed its mission.”
Pausing, Domel made a slow, sweeping gesture to indicate the carved faces ranged behind him. Then he pointed at Lorso, not looking at the man. “What would the ancestors say?”
A wind of condemnation rushed through the gathering. In the ruddy fireglow, the confused, active mass of their brightly embroidered, appliquéd, and beaded clothing created an image of fire in itself. A tentative shout of “Guilty!” rose. It was repeated, louder. Another voice attempted to argue, and was shouted down.
Raising a hand, Domel silenced the growing hostility. He smiled. Strong white teeth contrasted with the eroded features. Contempt clanged in his words. “What children you are. The Skan fight for gain. We prove our courage, our skills, in combat. What idiot spawned this notion of dying for honor? If a man chooses to fight another for glory or to right a wrong, that’s the way of men: we all know it to be a fool’s way. But a tribe fights to survive, to destroy enemies. And to prosper. As the first ancestor taught us: ‘What we have, we defend; what we want, we take.’ Trade is good, pillage is better. But the Skan consider cost. Always. Lorso understands.”
When Domel paused for breath, the gathering managed only a sullen murmur. He continued. “The Skan prey on the lesser creatures, as the first ancestor showed us. Now, listen to Lorso.”
When Domel was seated again, Lorso removed his sandals, resumed his place on the block. Much more conciliatory, he said, “There were no slaves, no products near the coast. Only Wolves. The Kwa betrayed us, attacked early. They were crushed. They hurt the Three Territories, but not enough. Now we join forces with the more dependable River People and Windband. In the spring, Windband and the Rivers help us destroy Gan Moondark. We will harvest his people and their possessions from north of Destroyer Mountain to the Mother River.”
