by Jay Lake
“Then let her speak.” Mother Vishtha pointed at the Dancing Mistress and snarled, “Defend yourself, miserable creature.”
“Wh-where is lodgings?” the pardine stammered in horrendously accented Seliu.
I glanced at her, amazed. “What?” I demanded in Petraean.
“I only know a few phrases,” she snapped, not taking her eyes off the crossbow. “I’d figured on having more time here to learn before things grew difficult.”
“The yowling of an animal,” Mother Vishtha announced. “Just as a bird may be taught to speak, so has someone taught this one.” She glared at me. “How could you?”
“Why did you come here?” I demanded hotly of the Mothers. Surely they had not trooped down the stairs to harass me over this.
Some of the anger left Mother Vishtha’s face. “To bring you before the Mothers in assembly.”
Mother Argai’s crossbow wavered slightly as she spoke. “The Street Guild and the Bittern Court both seek charges. One of the dead is a Master’s son.”
“Your little adventure today was badly played,” Mother Vishtha said. “We should have barred you from those blacks when you first made them.”
Only I’d done too well as a Blade, I realized. The runs, which were meant to embarrass me and turn the sentiment of the sworn women against me, had induced the opposite effect.
“Green.” The Dancing Mistress’ voice was thick and low.
“They are here to conduct us upstairs,” I told her. “To a hearing before the Mothers of the Temple of the Silver Lily. I do not know how this may go.”
“Will they kill us?”
“Likely not.” Not me, at any rate. Would that I knew more than “likely.”
“I am going to dress—”
“No,” Mother Vishtha interrupted. “Not in your ridiculous costume.” She threw me the pale robe of undyed muslin of an aspirant.
I slipped myself into the robe, directly over my skin.
“Will your animal need a collar?” asked Mother Argai in a nasty voice.
I waited until my head was clear and she could hear my words. “No more so than you.”
Her face tightened, but her finger on the crossbow trigger did not.
The Dancing Mistress gathered her torn, muddy toga close and followed me out. We went up the stairs with Mother Vishtha in front of us and weapons at our back.
We did not go to the little room high in the temple, as I had expected. I’d thought to see an inner court as I had once before, Mother Vajpai and Mother Meiko besides Mother Vishtha and one or two of the other senior Mothers.
Instead we entered the main sanctuary. Wednesday afternoon wasn’t time for services, but still the galleried seats were nearly full. Mothers in the robes and sashes of all the temple orders were present, as were a number of women from outside. I saw more than a few in the colors of Street Guild wives or the Bittern Court.
Of course the Bittern Court. I’d done them a bad turn, in the death of the man Curry when I’d dropped his key into the harbor. Whoever had arranged that killing now saw a chance to pay me out for my insolence.
“We are to be made an example of,” I whispered to the Dancing Mistress.
“You don’t say.”
Despairing of her fate, I fell silent then. There was little I could tell her, unless it came time for me to translate some speech or exhortation. Or sentence.
The Temple Mother waited before the altar at the center of the sacred circle. Always the woman in that role was the senior Mother of the priestesses, though she was advised by the Justiciary Mother, the Blade Mother—Mother Meiko since before I’d been here—and a few of the other senior Mothers from the healing and teaching orders.
I had never had much to do with the Temple Mother. She had lost her color with age, rather than never having had it baked into her in the first place as with a northerner under their tiny pale sun. Her name was Mother Umaavani, though I knew no one who called her by that name except Mother Meiko.
Today the Temple Mother stood and stared at me with those pale eyes as I walked downward among the ring of seats. The Dancing Mistress followed half a pace behind me. I knew from the prickle of my back that Mother Argai still stood at the top of the gallery with her crossbow, and probably the rest of the impromptu handle that Mother Vishtha had put together to come fetch me.
It was strange to be stared at by the old woman, who normally attended only to the altar and the progress of the prayers. This truly was a hearing and not a service—no incense, no bells, no scurrying priestly aspirants.
Just a very angry Temple Mother, me, and the woman who was both my oldest teacher and newest lover.
I stared back, gave her my hardest glare. Where I could make even Mother Gita look aside when the anger was upon me, there was nothing in me that would push away the Temple Mother. No more than I could push Mother Meiko, I realized.
In moments, I stood at the bottom of the steps in the circle of the altar. I had never walked here—never expected to, except when it came time to take my vows as a sworn Blade.
She must have been thinking the same thing, for the first words the Temple Mother said to me were “I had hoped to meet you differently, Green.”
“Mother.” She was the only Mother in the entire Lily Temple who required no name or title beyond that honorific.
“You seem to have been a great deal of trouble, dear.”
Though her voice and words were sweet enough, I knew the look on her face. This woman might well have run with the Blades at some time in her life. Not that I’d ever heard such a rumor, but the hardness was there.
“I have done what was needed, Mother.”
“Oh, yes.” She began to pace in front of the great silver lily as if the two of us were having a conversation, without the Dancing Mistress at my side and more than two hundred others looking on. “How did you know these things were needed? Did the Goddess speak to you?”
“At times,” I said baldly. If I could keep them talking, we might somehow both walk away. “But I never understood what was required of me. Her voice is like distant thunder, Mother, telling me of rain, but not how much water will flow across my doorstep.”
“So it is with the Goddess sometimes, child.” The Temple Mother’s voice was filled with sadness. “If She herself did not tell you what was needed, how did you know Her will?”
I took a deep breath. I did not know where these questions might yet lead. All I could do was follow, and try to jump where she pointed. “I judged for myself, Mother.”
“And did Mother Blade and your other teachers not tell you the one true rule of the Lily Blades?”
This trap I knew. I’d stepped into it as casually as a child walking into a mud puddle. I saw no point in pretending to coyness. “We do not judge.”
“She has judged,” the Temple Mother called out in a voice that rang to the heights of the sanctuary. “Even where we have taught her to do no such thing.”
Applause smattered above me, followed by the buzz of voices. The Temple Mother was speaking to the Street Guild, I realized. And the Bittern Court.
I must push, I realized. If they’d intended me to remain silent, Mother Vishtha would have said so coming up the stairs. “We judge every moment, Mother,” I called out loudly. “We are taught to judge when not to bare our weapons. We are taught to judge when to step into one dispute and when not to interfere in another. We judge all the time, for to make no judgments at all is a far worse error than to sometimes be wrong.”
“You . . . do . . . not . . . judge,” said the Temple Mother. “And in your pride, you brought a dangerous foreigner to our city.”
On this, much of the matter hung. I turned to the Dancing Mistress. She was strangely relaxed, given the trouble unfolding around her. Surely the general meaning of the Temple Mother’s words were clear, even if their specifics were hidden in the sounds of an unknown tongue.
If the Dancing Mistress had been a woman of Kalimpura, she would have been safe from th
e Death Right. As a foreigner, she was at risk.
Another strategy occurred to me. I almost laughed. All was already lost, how could another throw of chance deepen the well? “She is not a dangerous foreigner, Mother. I have been told by Mother Vishtha and Mother Argai that this is an animal.” I cleared my throat and cast my voice as loudly as I could. “Animals are not subject to the Death Right.”
Someone yelped with startled laughter high in the gallery, but was quickly hushed.
“Be careful what you ask for,” the Temple Mother said in a conversational voice. “If she is an animal, we are free to chain her in the training rooms and spill her life for weapons practice.”
Like the pigs and dogs I had killed, and the bullock for whose life I had asked so recently. I felt slightly ill. The time for a simple plea for forgiveness was long past. Not that I’d known what to ask. Mercy, perhaps, but I’d had little mercy shown to me in this life, nor held much in my own heart.
I pitched my voice high again. “Am I wrong, Mother? To aid my oldest teacher in her time of need? In the cities of the Stone Coast, we do not have Mothers, but she was a Mistress to me. Much the same. I bared my blade for her just as I would have done for you.”
She gave me a long sad look. “We do not have Mothers? Surely you meant to say they do not have Mothers.”
The gallery broke into a roar of voices. A drop of water hit my face, then another. I looked up, but there was only the towering point of the sanctuary’s distant roof.
“You do realize what this place looks like,” the Dancing Mistress muttered. I glanced at her as she made a vagina sign by nearly crossing the webs of her thumbs until a curved slit showed between them. Crude as that was, in that moment I was very glad that no one around us spoke Petraean. She’d intended the insult, and she’d intended it to be understood.
Nothing was above me to send the water down. Another spray of drops swirled around me on a wind. I recalled my dream, down in the cell below, of rain and lilies and the death of cities.
“I call . . .,”I shouted, then stopped. The gallery began to calm at the echo of my voice. I stared at the Temple Mother, but she was not focusing on me. From the fiery glare in her eyes, she had caught the gist of the Dancing Mistress’ remark. My last gambit had failed; now I would play for all. “Mother Umaavani,” I said, adding to the Dancing Mistress’ insult with deliberate disrespect of my own, “I call upon the mercy and wisdom of the Lily Goddess to pronounce upon my case. Lay your charges before Her, if She does not already know them, and let us see what She says of both me and my teacher.”
I heard another laugh in the gallery, this one loud and clear. The voice sounded like Mother Shesturi. There were some here who still cared for me.
“Very well.” The Temple Mother’s tones were ice now. “So it will be done. On your soul the burden rests.”
The gallery erupted again. Protests were shouted from higher up—by the outsiders, I was sure—but they were drowned out by the chatter of the women in the lower seats.
The Temple Mother pointed the Dancing Mistress and me to a low bench at the edge of the altar circle, just beneath the bottom tier of the gallery. It was normally used by aspirants awaiting their vows, or others sitting out a service until their special role was called upon.
This bench also had the advantage of being out of the line of fire of Mother Argai’s crossbow.
“What takes place here?” the Dancing Mistress asked in an urgent whisper.
“We are to be judged by the Goddess.”
“Really?”
“Yes.” I frowned at her. “I have made the best play I know for our lives and freedom. These women have no mercy, but the Goddess has been speaking to me. And Her power is very real. This is not Copper Downs. The divine does not drowse the years away here. There is risk, though. Most dicta from the Goddess are as She inspires the Temple Mother.”
“The Temple Mother says what she wishes, then credits your Goddess?” The sarcasm in her voice could have been scraped off with a spoon.
“Well, yes.” Put so baldly, the flaw in my plan was obvious enough. “Yet there are times when the Goddess speaks directly through her. Our gamble is that the Goddess will personally engage this matter, as she has been with me at times.”
“Why do you think that, Green?” I could hear the fear in her voice. The end might come at any moment, and the Dancing Mistress could not fight free of so many.
“Because I dreamed of rain, when we were below, and rain fell on me just now at the altar.”
She sighed. “She is not a rain goddess, is she?”
I shook my head. My Mistress’ life hung by far too thin a thread.
“Then let us hope your dreams are far more powerful than mine.”
As the altar was set up, a woman of the Bittern Court finally forced her way down to the sacred circle. Several Mothers from the Blades trailed protesting in her wake. The Temple Mother was having her sacred robes drawn over her by two aspirants.
When she turned to face the woman who approached in the harbor-gray silks of the Bittern Court, exasperation was plain upon the Temple Mother’s face.
“You cannot do this,” the Bittern Court woman said quietly. That there was no greeting or introduction told me they must have been speaking earlier, and were once more taking up the conversation in this awkward moment.
“I do not strut into your Great Room and tell the Prince of the Bittern Court how he may dispose ships in the harbor,” the Temple Mother said sharply. “It is not for you to come to my altar and tell me when and how to petition my Goddess.”
“We have an agreement.” Though she stood with her back to me, and might as well have pretended I was made of air and smoke, the Bittern Court woman’s wag of her chin to indicate me was clear enough from behind.
“We have an agreement to pursue the deaths today,” the Temple Mother said. “I am pursuing them. You will have your turn.”
“My turn is first.” There was venom in the other woman’s voice.
“Not when the issue is at prayer before the altar of my Goddess.” The Temple Mother’s tone matched the poison of the Bittern Court woman. “Now I suggest you go back to your seat before your daughters are made barren.”
When she turned, the woman finally looked at me. If a cast of the eyes could cut, I would have departed in a basket. I smiled broadly at her and nodded as though we were friends meeting in the market.
She left, shaking. I wondered if she would resume her seat in the gallery. More likely, there would be bullyboys in the pay of the Bittern Court lying for me, should I pass out the doors of the sanctuary with my freedom intact.
Though it would take a particularly foolish or ignorant street fighter to take on a Lily Blade. Any Blade had a number of very well armed friends.
Assuming, of course, that vowed or unvowed I was still a Blade when this proceeding ended.
One of the priestly aspirants began to light the thuribles hung around the altar. The look she shot me was full of worry. Interesting. I was still not convinced that my life was at stake, but the Dancing Mistress’ certainly was. We had upset whatever their plan was for this convocation.
The incense smoldered. At this time of year, there was saffron crumbled into it, which gave the smoke a strange smell of wormwood and sunflowers—nothing like what the spice did in food. A chanted prayer began among the circling aspirants, who were joined by two Priestess Mothers whose faces I recognized but who I did not know by name.
The prayer went on, calling on the Lily Goddess for Her strength in times of strife. I hadn’t heard this one before. It sounded more like a war prayer than an invocation of wisdom. The women’s way was not to stand to a fight. Even we Blades ran secretly, or did black work.
Still, they prayed the virtues of arm and shield and bright helm. The Temple Mother stepped forward, spread her arms, and led the gallery in the Hymn to Change.
O Lily, Mother of
us all Here in Your sacred hall
Wat
ch over us as we age
From cradle to the grave
From child to maid so gay
To mother then crone so gray
Make us better than our fears
Down the course of bitter years
The singing died down with the last notes of the peti being played above the gallery. Its bellows eased to a stop with a familiar creaking wheeze. The Temple Mother turned to her altar, dropped her chin, and began to pray again, this time alone. Her voice ran in a long wavering chant, never pausing for breath.
The Dancing Mistress clutched at my arm. “Something comes,” she whispered so softly, she scarcely had voice at all.
The Temple Mother’s vestments began to stir in a familiar swirl. I felt a chill down my own back—fear or something else, I did not know. A great wind rustled, even though it did not pass through the hall except to send the smoke from the thuribles circling the Temple Mother.
I thought of rain, and the death of cities, and slipped the Dancing Mistress’ hand within mine. This was to be a channel, direct possession by the Goddess, rather than “inspiration.” What I had gambled for, but all I’d really done was change the rules. I could not say what profit this would bring me, or whether I would be right in the risk I had taken for both me and my teacher.
The wind suddenly turned furnace hot. Screams echoed in the gallery above as doors slammed open. Some of the altar cloths whipped loose to catch upon the great silver lily. My groin ached like a stab wound, and I felt a sudden, terrible flow of blood from within my vagina. Doubled over against it, I could see red-brown spots emerging on the robes of the aspirants near the altar. A fearful wailing erupted from above.
All the women in this place must be bleeding.
SILENCE, said the Temple Mother in a voice that was much, much larger than she.
The air stilled in an instant. Even the thuribles stopped shivering on their chains. A moment later the sanctuary was quiet enough you could have heard a flower unfold.
I AM CALLED. The Lily Goddess slowly turned the Temple Mother’s body so everyone in all the galleries could see Her divine aspect. If I focused my eyes on Her hand or Her hair, I still saw Mother Umaavani. Except for the dark blood flowing down one sandaled foot, she looked the same as ever. If I tried to see Her as a whole, She filled the sanctuary. More to the point, She filled a place in my head.
