In the Ruins (65 page)

They welcomed her easily, and with an efficient manner born of practice. A mat was brought and placed on the chief’s seat. Here she settled, relieved to be out of the sway and lurch of the litter. The blood knives swarmed, always wanting to control her least action, but White Feather swept them out ruthlessly so that Feather Cloak could nurse the babies.

After this, the chief brought sharp beer and sweet cactus fruit, gruel, toasted grubs, and fowl dressed in wild herbs and sweetened with sap. She still could not get used to the sight of so much food. Yet when at last she addressed the chief to thank them for the food, they apologized for the impoverished feast, which they said was nothing compared to what was due to her eminence.

“Let me speak to your council to hear how life goes for you here,” she said.

The council was called hastily, elders, folk who had distinguished themselves, someone to represent each clan.

“We have no Rabbit Clan in our town,” said the chief. “Nor Lizard Clan.”

The blood knives stirred. “None out of the Rabbit Clan survived in exile,” they said. “No one kept their House, as is proper.”

Folk whispered, looking frightened. It was a dangerous thing to let the world slip out of balance.

“But there were so many before,” said the lady chief. “We were the few, who walked out into the barbarian lands. Those who remained behind to tend to the land were
multitudes. Yet now we are the many, and you, those who came out of exile, are the few.”

White Feather seemed about to speak angry words, so Feather Cloak raised a hand, and all fell silent.

“The tale of our time in exile has already been told.” She looked directly at the blood knives. “Has an almanac yet been painted to record the tale of our struggle?”

“We have much ordering to do, to restore the Houses and the lines and the proper measure of tribute. We must recover and restore the ritual almanacs first.”

“I would not like to see the tale lost,” she said mildly, but as a warning. Let them chew on that! She gestured to the council, inviting them to speak. “Is this the town you came from originally?”

They told their stories. The husband chief had been born here, even if raised in the barbarian lands. He had come to this home, because it was the only one he knew. A scattering of people who had claims that allowed them to labor in the surrounding lands had brought in other unlanded folk. Mostly, people worked the fields, but despite this, the community was sparsely settled compared to the days before exile.

“Not enough men to clear the fields,” complained the lady chief. “We women are behind on our tribute offers of cloth. We can’t harvest the fiber quickly enough. The fields are still green. We have no thread for weaving.”

“What is your measure of tribute?” Feather Cloak asked them.

The list, reeled off from memory, seemed to her a staggering sum: feathers, paper, cloth in the form of short capes, incense from the smoke tree, and a range of agricultural goods for the temple and palace in the nearby city. But of course the birds were gone, the trees dead and any new growth yet seedlings, and the fields only newly sprouted with what little seed those who had survived the shadows had carried with them.

“The tribute lists must be redrawn,” said Feather Cloak, as she said every day. “Until the people are healthy and the granaries are full, until there is seed corn in plenty, we
must put all our effort into restoring our fields and our population.”

“Tribute is necessary to maintain the universe,” said the blood knives, as they said every day. “To keep the balance, we must pray, we must bleed, we must keep our oaths, burn incense, and offer sacrifices.”

“So it must be done,” she agreed, “but not to the measure in the days before exile, or we will be drained dry again!”

“All your blood knives are dead,” they said, coming back to this point as they did every day. “It is no wonder the land was drained dry, that the balance was lost.”

“You know nothing!” cried White Feather.

“Silence!” said Feather Cloak, and they gave her silence.

The council was made uncomfortable by this dispute. They feared the blood knives. They prayed to the gods. They followed the example of the one who was elected from among the elite to become Feather Cloak, meant to be a mature woman, pious, virtuous, generous, of an invincible spirit as well as possessing the unquenchable power of life, granted to her by the gods.

“I will set a measure of tribute for this year, and the next. The year after, a census will be taken and a new measure allotted.”

It always struck her as strange that, while some in the communities welcomed this relief, others were made uneasy by it. When she called an end to the council, she saw the blood knives circulate out among the gathered council, whispering and plotting. All left her, so she was alone in the chamber, with a mat for sleeping and four strips of cloth hung from the post and lintel doorframe to give her privacy. The walls had been recently plastered and a painting begun on one wall, depicting the long march through the shadows with the sacred animals standing guard overhead.

“You must rest,” said White Feather, bringing the babies back for another feeding.

Feather Cloak’s son played the flute in a restful way, and out in the courtyard an unseen woman was grinding grain
into flour in a soothing rhythm, but Feather Cloak could not find calm in her heart.

“Most of the blood knives must have stayed behind in the land, while these few walked out into the world,” she mused. “Yet I never knew any blood knives. They were all gone by the time I was a child. And you, my elders, never speak of them.”

White Feather looked at the mural, the images picked out with charcoal but only a few places colored in. The room was dim because night was coming. “They were weaker than our enemies. They could not help us. They cried to the gods and wanted to follow the old ways in exile, when it was obvious to everyone by then that the old ways would kill us.” Her voice grew tight and her jaw rigid. “That the old ways did kill us.”

“We no longer live in exile,” said Feather Cloak.

“It is difficult to leave exile. Even when you have come home. Especially when you have come home.”

For all of Feather Cloak’s life, the city on the lake had lain deserted although in the days before exile it had been the greatest city in the land which was at that time called Abundance-Is-Ours-If-The-Gods-Do-Not-Change-Their-Minds. When she was a young child, there had still been a few marshy areas through which a girl and her age mates might search for scrumptious frogs and crunchy insects, but by the time she had given birth to her first child even these wet depressions had dried out and the lakebed become a haven for nothing except a few inedible weeds and precious stands of hardy sap cactus.

Now, of course, after winter rains and spring rains, the lake had disgorged its share of the returning waters. She asked her bearers to halt on the causeway. From the height of the litter, she gazed over stretches of unbroken water rimmed by brilliant bursts of green where reeds and grasses burgeoned along the current shoreline. Vast flocks of birds of every description, most of them kinds she had never seen, ranged on the waters, clucking and wheedling and croaking and whistling each in their own tongue, and insects buzzed and chirred and in general
made a nuisance of themselves. She-Who-Creates was busy!

The farmers had dug their canals out beyond that shoreline, figuring that the lake would continue to grow, although naturally no one had any idea if it would ever refill the old basin, or grow beyond it. Most of the adult population was out there today building more fields out of dirt and mud, or tending to young plants waxing in earth planted and tended over the last few months.

He-Who-Burns showed his face intermittently. Those who had walked in the shadows told her that in the days before there came for certain months of the year a time with rain, and after that a time when He-Who-Burns baked the Earth with his blazing fire. There were two seasons, together with the passages between them, tied to the equinox. It was still early in the year, in the time of rains when all things grew, watered both within and without in the field that is Earth. Although the city had lost its abundance during the time of exile, it seemed that after all, having returned to Earth, that the gods had not changed their minds. They still wanted their children to flourish, to make a new home all over again.

“Feather Cloak! You are too bold!”

“Feather Cloak! You must not let the noonday sun touch you!”

“Feather Cloak! You were to approach on the eastern causeway. This is the causeway for merchants and artisans!”

“Feather Cloak! Have you come to begin work on restoring the temples? All else means nothing if the proper rituals are not observed!”

“How are you come to leave the sacred precinct in the Heart-of-the-World’s-Beginning? Who allowed this to happen, in this month? It was not the proper time!”

The blood knives, the ones who had set up residence in the temple in the center of the city on the lake, had seen her coming. They swarmed like wasps out along the causeway to meet her, and to castigate her. She fanned herself with a fan built of green-and-gold feathers, the mark of the most holy bird sacred to She-Who-Creates, and because of
this gesture they fell silent according to their own laws and their own customs.

“It is time to see the market opened,” she said to them, and to her bearers she said, “We will move on.”

The causeway was not yet surrounded by water, and there were some children off to one side digging in the mud for roots or seeking tadpoles, young frogs, grubs, crickets, or other such treats. They gaped to see the litter pass, and the blood knives shouted at them for their lack of respect and modesty.

“Why are they not at their study in the house of youth?” Feather Cloak asked them, and after that they considered her words more thoughtfully.

The procession entered the city through the gate of skulls and moved on toward the central precinct. Many folk had returned to the city, but in any case only one house out of twenty was inhabited. In the days before, according to the census undertaken in the days before by the blood knives, the city had been organized into five bundles of wards, and each ward had been organized into a bundle of neighborhoods each populated by forty households of ten to twenty people each. It was difficult for her to imagine so many people, but the empty quarters told their own story.

Even the palace where she must stay, with its forgotten rooms and echoing reaches, must remind her of how many had died, how many had been lost.

A suite of rooms had been prepared in haste for her coming. The blood knives complained about the poor furnishings, the deterioration of the wall paintings, faded from their years in exile, the lack of a sumptuous feast. Nothing was good enough. The balance had been lost in exile.

“Enough!” she said. “Bring the judges to me, and the scribes. Word has gone out through the land at my order. Just as Belly-Of-The-Land lies at the center of the land, so will the central market be opened by official decree, so that all of the people will know that we Cursed Ones have taken possession of all of our land. As before, so again.”

Folk began arriving that afternoon. By the next morning, as her bearers carried her to the market plaza, she
could actually hear the steady hum of so many voices raised in common conversation that the sound seemed to permeate the entire city. The procession passed the temple plaza, marked off by walls and undulating stone serpents. Smoke rose from the house of He-Who-Burns, sited at the top of the great temple in the very heart of the city. Looking through the wide gate, she saw a bundle of young women dancing in their serpent skirts before the altar of She-Who-Will-Not-Have-A-Husband, calling, and clapping, and keeping time with the stamp of their feet. Runners passed in through the gates to the temple plaza, carrying cages with quail.

“The sacrifices must be made at sunset,” said the blood knives. “The first day of the month of Winds must be sanctified by blood.”

They never stopped.

“It would be best if you remained at the Heart-Of-The-World’s Beginning,” they said. “Our runners can bring you news of all that transpires in the land.”

But could she trust the news they brought her? She did not voice these doubts aloud, and they went on.

“We insult the gods by not bringing in work gangs to whitewash and paint, to refurbish the house of the gods.”

“Let the fields be raised and planted first,” she said.

The oldest among them leaned in close, his breath sharp with the smell of pepper. “If you who were cursed to die in exile had not stopped performing the sacrifices, then you would not have lost the gods’ favor.”

She bent her head to look him in the eye, a look that would have quelled dissent among her own people, but he came from a different world. He feared the cloak, but he did not respect her.

“How do you know what we suffered in exile?” she asked him. “You walked between the worlds for the course of a Great Year, fifty-two cycles of fifty-two years, yet according to all reports I have heard, it seemed to those of you that you walked in the shadows for only some months. We lingered in exile for generations. The world you live in—in your heart—has not changed, but the world you come to is not the one you left.”

“What we owe the gods does not change,” he said. “If we remember the offerings, then the rain will fall at the proper time and the sun will shine at the proper time.”

There is no arguing with a man who cannot see the world as it is around him. It was human sorcerers who had woven the spell that had exiled them, and human sorcery that had poisoned the lands beyond. She remained silent, and he mumbled complaints under his breath, tallying up his list.

But her brooding could not last. A market during her life in exile was any patch of ground where folk spread a blanket on which to display a handful of precious nuts or bruised tubers or reed mats or a wooden staff with a carved spear point. This plaza was only the entryway; the market took up the entire district, and even if it was by no means fully tenanted, it was truly overwhelming, more people than she had ever seen together at one time in her entire life.