“Oh, yes, that is her chief aspect, I believe, but she is also a goddess of magic. I used to know one of her priests in Keo, years ago. He gave me a spell to sharpen eyesight that works almost as well as Uelis Nisker’s.”
“Priests make poor magicians,” Aruendiel said.
He was ready to expand upon this observation, but Nansis Abora continued, with an air of equanimity: “Oemo was quite all right with healing magic. And a very learned man. At any rate, he said that there used to be all sorts of little splinter cults here and there that worshipped Sisoaneer as a goddess of magic under different names: Tuth in Mirne Klep; Keersinl in Pelagnia—and I can’t remember what they called her in Wor. Nethl? Nenil? No, dear me, that’s a kind of fish, isn’t it?”
“Keersinl?” There was an odd note in Aruendiel’s voice, as though he did not quite take in what Nansis Abora had just told him.
“Yes, that’s what they called her in Pelagnia,” he said. “Oemo, my friend the priest, said it was mostly the old women in the country who worshipped her. I’d never heard of Keersinl, myself. Do you know of her, then?”
Aruendiel’s gaze seemed to have sharpened, but he was not looking at Nansis Abora. “I know who Keersinl is,” he said finally.
“Oh? I never think of you as being especially pious. How—”
“I honor the true gods, as any man should,” Aruendiel snapped, “and in return I expect them to take as little interest in my affairs as possible. They usually oblige.” He released the back of the chair from knuckles that had gone white and bent his head, as though reflecting. “And now—Keersinl. Sisoaneer. Whatever she calls herself, she has Nora.”
“We don’t know that—” Nansis Abora began again.
“I know,” Aruendiel said.
Chapter 18
Nora knelt beside the litter and lifted the patient’s hand, wrapping it in both of her own. Not patient, pilgrim, she corrected herself. It was a large, rather hairy hand, the palm leathery with calluses that came from hitting other people with a sword, over and over again. Under normal circumstances, his grip could probably crush her fingers. Now his hand lay flabby and exhausted in hers, clammy with feverish sweat.
Beside her, Oasme was interrogating the pilgrim’s companions, a serious-faced group of middle-aged men, some in armor, and one very young woman, about six months pregnant. Two men were doing most of the talking in a rapid-fire, irritable-sounding language. When they paused, Oasme hissed the relevant details in Nora’s ear. “Baron Tesein of Haariku—abdominal wound, stabbing—his brother, they said. Wound healed up, but the baron continues to weaken. Fever—seepage. Not eating. They’re concerned about the succession. Probably internal bleeding, Blessed Lady, and infection. No sign of rot, though.”
Good, that meant they wouldn’t have to bring out the maggots. “All right, we’ll open it up, clean it, and then close it,” Nora said. “And then I’ll do the strengthening spell. Sound good?”
“Very good,” said Oasme, making a note on the wax tablet he carried. “And I wonder—a spell to increase the appetite? Can you manage that? He looks as though he needs some nourishment, and the family always feels better when the pilgrim starts eating again.”
Nora hesitated. “Can we wait until we’re sure the wound is healing?”
“But of course it will,” Oasme said smoothly. “Well, we can wait a day.” He turned back to the waiting group and began to explain the treatment in a rat-a-tat of hard-edged syllables.
Oasme kept doing that, pushing her to do more magic, more complicated spells. But then he was usually right about what the pilgrims needed. He had a keen eye for diagnosis, even if he couldn’t do magic, and he knew which spells his old Chief Priest had used to treat particular ailments. Over the past two weeks, as pilgrims had arrived by the dozens for the Fifth Moon Festival—feverish, bleeding, covered with sores, crippled, blinded, wasted by tumors, racked by pain—he and Nora had forged a surprisingly workable partnership. She knew very well that she could not help them without his aid.
Or the goddess’s aid—but that went without saying.
Nora mouthed the words she repeated each time she began treating a pilgrim: “Sisoaneer, please hear me. Lend me your power.” The words were deliberately simple. Nora preferred to think of them as a friendly request, not a prayer—something different from the long, flattering invocations that she recited every morning and evening in the temple, repeating them line by line after Uliverat. At least a few of those elaborate compliments might be truthful or deserved, Nora reckoned. She spoke them dutifully. This was part of the job, she told herself. Keeping the goddess happy.
Wa, the ganoi nurse, had already removed the stained bandage from the baron’s abdomen; now she carefully washed the seeping wound. As soon as she had finished, Nora leaned closer. She could sense the torn membranes, the troubled flesh in the baron’s belly. Carefully she bid the tissue to heal, making sure that the deepest parts of the wound would knit first. And then Sisoaneer’s power moved through her, taking her into that blessed place where there was no doubt or death.
This is what it’s like to be a goddess, Nora thought, as the exigencies of the ordinary world receded into a vast, potent calm. Sisoaneer herself was somewhere nearby, unseen, coloring the sweetness of the flowing magic with a faint melancholy that Nora always found a little surprising.
Then it was over, and Nora was limp, her thoughts ashen. She was never quite prepared for how far she had to fall after the goddess’s magic was gone. At least the nausea had not recurred, thankfully.
There was still the infection to treat. Privately Nora wished for antibiotics at a time like this, but what she did have was a strengthening spell that apparently boosted a pilgrim’s immune system to extraordinary vigor. Sometimes—not always—it was enough to fight off the disease. Nora called on the goddess again, savoring the brief taste of divinity before it faded.
“Are you finished?” Oasme asked. Nora nodded, tiredly. He inspected the baron, who moved feebly and half opened his eyes. “Not too bad,” Oasme decided. “I’ll order that poppy syrup and have one of the women sit with him tonight. What a pity you haven’t been able to get that sleep spell to work.”
“Who’s next?” Nora rubbed the back of her neck. The headache had begun again. It had been coming and going for a week now, a hot, dry band squeezing Nora’s skull. Physician, heal thyself, she thought, and did a swift, discreet spell that untied the knot of the pain, at least temporarily. Thank you, Sisoaneer.
“You’re done here. More than a dozen pilgrims today, excellent. Now you will need to see Uliverat and Yaioni, and then tonight is Ieona, the midpoint of the festival. You’ll be leading the ceremonies.”
Nora looked up, grimacing. “Wait. Is that the bit with the dance? I thought maybe Yaioni could do that—”
Oasme arched his eyebrows. “Is it Yaioni who has healed so many pilgrims during the festival? Who has glorified Her Holiness and brought fresh renown to Erchkaii?” In a more pragmatic tone, he added: “Yaioni and some of the women will be in the dance also. Just do what they do. We know that the goddess did not choose you for your dancing abilities.”
“Very funny,” Nora said. She stood up, straightening the folds of her maran automatically. She had found that there was indeed a way of carrying her body inside the gown—waist stiff, steps measured—that kept her looking reasonably unrumpled, but adjustments were still necessary throughout the day. “Tell Yaioni and Uliverat that I’ll see them in my antechamber in half an hour.”
Nora turned her steps to her quarters, worrying a little about the pilgrim with the arrowhead in his leg and wondering if Oasme was right about the pilgrim with the toothache—did all those teeth really have to come out?
Much of the time she felt like a fraud. She was a fraud. Using borrowed magic to do spells she’d barely mastered. Treating pilgrims with wounds so gruesome that she had to force herself just to look
at them, pretending that she knew what she was doing. The thing was, the pilgrims she treated were getting better, nearly all of them. It was remarkable. She felt nearly as grateful for each recovery as the pilgrim she’d healed. She could save lives, even if no one had been able to save EJ’s. Nothing else she had done in her life had been so unambiguously good. Could it be that her mother had been right about her vocation, in suggesting medical school?
She felt a surprising and urgent impulse to call her mother and ask her advice. I know this isn’t exactly what you meant, Mom, but I am helping people.
It would be an awkward call, though. She knew what her mother would say, more or less. If fire magic had freaked her out, the news that Nora was serving a pagan goddess would inspire hysteria of a sort that Nora didn’t care to imagine. And being a priestess was the good news—forget about any mention of Raclin’s fate or being stoned. Just as well it was impossible to call home, Nora thought grimly.
The other two priestesses were waiting in her rooms. Uliverat, as usual, launched into an account of how she had accomplished virtually every task of the day. The details varied, but the underlying theme was constant: without criticizing anyone directly, Uliverat made it clear that she waged a constant, cheerful, valiant, and underappreciated struggle against the laziness and inattention of most of the temple inhabitants, from the other clergy down to the ganoi serving men and women.
Yaioni leaned against the wall, eyes hooded, as Uliverat talked. She had a fashion model’s knack for making ennui look fascinating, Nora thought. And perhaps Yaioni had reason to be bored, since she did no healing magic at all now. But she was a surprisingly capable nurse, working side by side on the wards with Lemoes, deftly attentive to the pilgrims even as she glowered at them.
Nora had once dared to compliment Yaioni on her nursing skills. “My husband owned many slaves,” Yaioni said dismissively. “And slaves are always getting hurt.”
Today, as always, there were a myriad of minor problems. Pilgrims complaining about the food. Some of the ganoi not showing up for work. Rats in the storeroom. Another donkey had died, just when all available animals were needed to transport pilgrims from the lake. Fisticuffs breaking out when the families of two pilgrims who had sworn a blood feud happened to be housed in the same dormitory.
Nora sighed. “No weapons? Good. Then move one family to the other dormitory. If it happens again, they’ll all have to leave. Did anyone find out why Tuumo and Nanga didn’t come to work in the hospital today?”
“Sleeping off their hooch from the night before,” Uliverat said. “Or just lazy.”
“Yaioni, could you check on them, please,” Nora said. Yaioni’s reports on personnel matters were generally more accurate than Uliverat’s, because Yaioni showed no more disdain for the ganoi than for anyone else. From what Nora had seen, the ganoi did backbreaking work in the temple complex for not much in return, the right to hunt and graze their goats and raise their odd, bitter vegetables on temple lands. “Make sure they’re all right. And do we have traps in the storeroom?”
Yaioni stirred. “Her Holiness’s silent watcher eats the rats, usually.”
That was the temple snake, the one that Yaioni had hurled at Nora not so long ago. Repressing an urge to shiver, Nora stared back into Yaioni’s black eyes. “Some traps would also be good, ” she said. “And check to see whether anything needs to be thrown out.” She remembered something Oasme had said. “We should do an inventory on the medical stores; we need to order more unguents from Nenaveii.
“As for the food—” The meals in the refectory did not vary much from the menu Nora had tasted her first night—cheese, fish, greens, flatbread, occasionally goat meat—and the temple cooks used some combination of seasonings that left almost everything with a resinous undertone. If she’d had the time, Nora would have liked to venture into the kitchen to tinker with the recipes, though of course Oasme would have a fit. “Well, they don’t come here for the food,” she said.
She had never been solely in charge of anything more complicated than a section of a lecture course. What she had discovered in the past few weeks was that people often brought problems to the High Priestess that they could almost certainly solve themselves. What they wanted from her was simply an answer, a decision. She tried hard to make sure that it was the right decision, although sometimes that seemed to be less important than the fact that she had made it.
When Uliverat and Yaioni had gone, Nora went into her sleeping chamber, poured out a basinful of water to wash her hands and feet, and changed into the maran with the gold-threaded border. She did not hurry. These preparations had become as much a ritual as anything she did in the temple. She needed time to gird herself before her next duties.
As she dried her hands, she found herself smiling. A week ago, the pinkie finger on her left hand had been as tiny as a baby’s. Now the new finger was almost as long as its mate on her right hand. It still had a pristine, unused look. She curled her hand to tap the left pinkie against her thumb, marveling because touching finger to finger felt so completely ordinary.
Cradling the warm glow of gratitude in her heart, as though a stray draft might extinguish it, she hurried to the temple for evening prayers.
Oasme and the deaconesses were already there, along with a scattering of pilgrims. Nora took her place and chanted some of the prayers that Oasme had been teaching her. The short form tonight, thankfully. She only stumbled twice in the liturgy, her best performance yet. When she stopped chanting, there was pure silence for a long moment, then the slap-slap of her sandals as she walked past the great statue with its upraised knife. The cleft in the rock wall gaped wider.
She’s expecting me, Nora said to herself.
Behind her, she could hear the temple nave come to life with a wave of rustles, footfalls, murmurs. Class dismissed.
She moved deeper into the darkness of the cave, her hand brushing the rock. The first time she’d come alone, she’d tried to conjure a light, but the goddess wouldn’t lend her the magic. You won’t be lost, Sisoaneer had said, and so far she was right, but there was always a first time. Nora counted steps until she was sure that she had passed the hole to the deep caves. Now the passage led reassuringly upward.
This was where it did no good at all to count steps, because the distance to the top was different each time. Tonight the passage made at least a dozen twists before she reached the linteled exit and saw the glimmer of stars in the night sky.
It was the meadow tonight, not the mountain peak. Nora walked through the wiry grass. The air here was soft, full of the nighttime spring smells of cool earth and green sap. Clusters of pale petals on the ground showed a moony radiance. Close to the enormous oak at the edge of the meadow, she paused.
“Your Holiness, I am here,” she said, clasping her hands and bowing her head. Some kind of reverent gesture seemed to be required, but she was not about to throw herself on the ground, like Uliverat, if Sisoaneer did not absolutely demand it.
“My priestess!”
Two lean, long-toed feet in worn sandals stepped into Nora’s field of view. She raised her head to meet Sisoaneer’s dark eyes under tilting brows. “How are my people?” the goddess asked.
Nora began to recite the list of pilgrims she had treated that day. She was only halfway through the first case when Sisoaneer interrupted. What of the boy’s fever? Had he eaten breakfast? Had he been sweating, and did his sweat smell sour, sharp, or rotten? Nora had to confess that her examination had not been so thorough.
“You had him bathed!” Sisoaneer sounded amused. “And he didn’t like it.”
“That’s right,” Nora said. Sisoaneer often knew details about the pilgrims that Nora hadn’t mentioned. Some of this information might come from Yaioni, Nora judged, but it seemed to her the goddess had some other means of surveillance. She hears—not everything, but many things, Oasme had said. “They’d packed the wound with cla
y,” Nora said by way of explanation. “No wonder it was infected.”
“So messy,” the goddess agreed. “But it kept him from bleeding to death.”
“A clean bandage would have been better.” Nora thought of the small plastic miracle of Band-Aids in their tiny sterile envelopes, and marveled that she had ever taken them for granted.
“To avoid the tiny invisible creatures that bring the fever?” Sisoaneer’s long smile flashed.
“Yes, exactly!” Nora was not backing away from the germ theory of disease, even if Sisoaneer and her new colleagues had been skeptical ever since Nora had explained it. Shouldn’t a goddess of healing know about viruses and bacteria? Nora wondered. But then, Jesus didn’t, or if he did, he never mentioned it when he was healing all those lepers.
Sisoaneer seemed to enjoy Nora’s vehemence. “Yes, you are right, a clean bandage is better than clay, whether for keeping out the poisons in the air or your little monsters. Well, the bath was good for him. You must keep giving him a strengthening spell, but not more than once a day. If he does not eat tomorrow, then do a spell to reduce the fever. He is past the worst of it now. He will be healed.” She spoke the last words as though the boy had no choice.
“Good,” said Nora. “I mean, praise to Your Holiness.”
They went through the other cases. The goddess was less optimistic about the young man from Bisr with the cough.
“He got out of bed today,” Nora said. “Oasme said that he could go home in a wee—”
Sisoaneer shook her head. For once there was no merriment in her face, not even hidden in the smallest crease. “Did he eat anything?”
“A little. More than yesterday.”
“Do not be foolishly hopeful,” Sisoaneer said. She drew herself up, as stiffly as though she herself were in pain. “I am the goddess of healing, but there are some that are bound for death. You know that already.”
How to Talk to a Goddess and Other Lessons in Real Magic Page 24