by NS Dolkart
There was a brief pause, during which Vella caught the look that her parents were sharing. There was some news about Criton’s family that they hadn’t told her yet, something they found vaguely unpleasant. Vella chose not to ask. She was sure she’d find out soon enough.
Her stomach rumbled. This would be a long fast.
“This’ll be a good visit,” she said, a bit defiantly. “It’s good to be home.”
5
Narky
This month had been miserable enough before the quake, but now it was truly hellish. Everyone wanted Narky’s personal assurances that the world was not coming to an end, but that was more than he could be sure of himself. He had holed himself up in his chambers in the temple, supposedly meditating and communing with his God, but so far Ravennis had been no help at all. Narky’s dreams over the past few nights, if at all prophetic, had been too confused and too easily forgotten to be of any help. With his God silent on the matter – or effectively so, anyway – Narky didn’t even know what to tell the other priests. So far, he had gotten by with the words, “Ravennis is our lord, and He will watch over us,” but he could only be evasive for so long. After all, it did not take much thought to realize that Ravennis would watch over everyone if they died too.
He wished he still had Mother Dinendra to advise him. The former High Priestess of Elkinar had been indispensable in the early years of the unified church, convincing her followers to embrace the notion that their God and Ravennis were one and the same. It was Mother Dinendra who had helped Narky memorize passages of the Elkinaran holy book The Second Cycle, who had spent countless hours teaching him how to better fulfill the duties of a high priest. When her bitter second-in-command Father Sephas had rebelled against the unified church and begun his own nihilistic sect, it was she who had held the region of Hagardis together with her leadership. Sephas still had his little cult of followers, but thanks to Mother Dinendra, his theology had had little chance to spread.
The Sephans refused to believe that Ravennis and Elkinar had ever been the same God. Sephas preached instead that Elkinar had been betrayed and murdered by Ravennis, and he led his followers in acts of sabotage and revenge against those they deemed to be their aggressors. They operated in secret, since in both Ardis and Anardis membership in the Sephan cult was punishable by death. Sephas himself had fled to Atuna, and there was perennially talk of bargaining for his extradition.
The talk never amounted to anything. King Mageris did not prioritize the religion as his father Magerion had, so Sephas’ status was always left out of trade agreements in favor of some other concession. To the first king, for whom the Ravennian religion had been an extension of his city’s power and influence, Sephas had been the last great piece of unfinished business. With Mageris, it seemed that the matter was settled – he simply hadn’t said so aloud yet.
Mageris was more sentimental and less ruthless than his father had been – the trouble was that he was sentimental about the days when High Priest Bestillos had ruled in the name of Magor. As a consequence, he had never looked kindly on Narky, the man who had killed his idol with a cowardly shot to the back. If not for the shadow of his father’s expectations and the degree to which Narky and Ptera had entrenched their religion in the city, Narky suspected that Mageris would have ordered his death within minutes of taking power. He still worried that it might happen someday.
Narky had never had more to live for. He and Ptera had a beautiful son, eight years old and sweeter than any child of Narky’s had a right to be. Grace had been a surprise to them both, born despite Ptera’s believed infertility. They had named him after the Graceful Servant, the first high priestess of Ravennis as Lord Below, who had also brought the two of them together.
It was a happy pairing, despite its origins – the marriage had been arranged entirely by Ptera and the Graceful Servant, and more or less forced on Narky. This remained a sore spot between them, though Narky had still endorsed Grace’s name wholeheartedly when Ptera suggested it. It was the Graceful Servant who had elevated him and named him as her successor, after all, and besides, the name fit their son perfectly. He was a graceful child.
At that age, Narky had been clumsy and unloved by anyone but his father. At that age, his mother had left him to chase after that ironmonger. It made Narky nervous, wondering if his God of Fate would be unkind enough to mirror that abandonment somehow. There was no particular reason to think Ravennis would be so cruel, except that Narky never expected kindness when fate was involved.
Would Ptera leave him? It seemed preposterous given how happy she appeared to be with their life together, but every little argument, every period of silence or pensive glance made his mind run wild with visions of some other man stealing her affections. When he confessed such thoughts to her, she only laughed and asked what kind of a man could possibly lure her away from her handsome young high priest. And he’d smile sheepishly and joke, “One with two eyes.”
It didn’t have to be a love affair that broke them – there were plenty of other, worse possibilities. Ravennis might choose to take one of them by illness or freak accident; He might inspire some lesser priest to murder Narky and take his place; He might turn Mageris against the priesthood. Every time someone in the family coughed, every time a supplicant asked him a question he could not answer, Narky felt a momentary panic. Was this the thing that would lead to Grace’s abandonment? No? How about this one?
He felt, somehow, that if Grace could reach his ninth birthday without disaster striking, things would be all right. He just needed everything to hold out until then.
And then, the skyquake. Nothing in the world could make a high priest more vulnerable than a disaster he couldn’t explain. Such a thing could only lead to panic. It had certainly led to his panic – he was supposed to have an answer, a confident explanation, and what did he have? Nothing.
He had hoped, the first day or two, that Ravennis might deign to give him some hint as to the skyquake’s origins and meaning, but by now he had more or less given up on that. If Ravennis did not speak to him, he would just have to make something up. Others were doing so already: there were prophets on every corner these days, making contradictory claims and sowing distrust in the priesthood. Narky hated to put words in his God’s mouth – it was a mortal risk every time – but Ravennis wasn’t leaving him much of a choice. The time to act had really been two weeks ago, when the quake struck. He had waited too long as it was.
At least he had Ptera to talk to about these things. She was the only member of the priesthood he knew he could trust, the only one who viewed his position as a personal accomplishment and never as an obstacle. Narky was undoubtedly respected by his peers, and his qualifications were unimpeachable, but there was no doubt that several priestly functions were beyond the reach of his talents. True theologians could run circles around him intellectually, and the pastoral functions of tending to the sick, comforting mourners, and so on, were best kept away from him. Narky was known and valued as a prophet, a tool of his God, but he did not have a light touch. Sooner or later, everyone found in him something to be frustrated by.
“What am I going to do?” Narky asked his wife. They were between services, and she had joined him in their room. Grace was elsewhere being tutored by a junior priest, and preparations for the day’s sacrifices were being overseen by a more junior one still.
“I don’t like lying, Ptera. How can I satisfy them all without lying?”
“Ravennis hasn’t abandoned you,” Ptera said. She was reclining on their bed, looking up at him patiently as he paced back and forth. “The last time we were in a crisis like this, He spoke through you to unify the church. You just haven’t needed Him like this in so long, you’ve lost your trust that He’ll see you through.”
“How do you know it wasn’t a fluke when He spoke through me? And anyway, I can’t lose a trust I never had. I didn’t expect Ravennis to speak through me, you know.”
Ptera smiled. “Listen to yourself, swe
etheart. After all the Lord Below has done for you and all that you’ve done for Him, you’re telling me you think His support might have been a fluke?”
“No,” Narky sighed. “No, I guess that is pretty ridiculous-sounding. It’s just that I’ve been waiting way too long for Him to show me what He wants, and I’ve gotten nothing. It’s like Ravennis hasn’t decided what to do yet either! Like I’m waiting for Him to tell me what to do, and He’s just waiting for me!”
She lay her head down on her arm. “He’ll guide you, Narky. He already has.”
“All right,” Narky said, “but when? I’ve run out of time – you see that, right? If I let this go on any longer, nobody will be listening to me by the time I do have something to say.”
“So what’ll you do?”
“I guess I’ll tell the people that Ravennis is testing us. You know, testing our faith in Him. I’ll say that as long as we make our sacrifices and worship the Lord Below with all our hearts, He won’t send another one of those quakes; but that if we don’t, He will. That way no one can really say I was wrong, no matter what happens.”
Ptera frowned, half rising again. “That’s not much, after two weeks of hiding back here. Let’s hope He chooses to speak through you instead.”
“Well, if He does,” Narky snapped, “it won’t really matter what I was planning to say, will it? I’ll just open my mouth and His words will be there. The only reason I need a plan at all is that He probably won’t speak through me. This’ll do, right?”
“It’ll do.”
She didn’t look remotely satisfied, but just then someone knocked on the door so Ptera let the conversation end there. “Come in,” she said, sitting up.
A senior priest, Lepidos, entered. “Sorry to interrupt, Your Eminence, but I thought you would want to see this.”
He was holding a scroll of cheap Atunaean reed paper with shaking hands. Narky could not read, but he knew a Sephan tract when he saw one. Sephas was constantly producing these treatises and manifestos calling on the former priests of Elkinar to turn against their new leaders and return to the old faith in defiance of Ravennis. They were always well-argued, for those who could even understand them, but though each one caused its own new controversy within Narky’s church, they had never yet succeeded at their insurrectionist goal. Sephas may have a brilliant analytical mind, but he had yet to accept the one basic truth that kept him in exile and Narky in the Great Temple: there was more power in the unified church than there had ever been in the separate ones.
When Narky had first come to the mountainous region of Hagardis, Elkinar had been only one of two major Gods there. He had been the foremost God of Anardis, and the secondary God of Ardis. Since the latter city had been dominant over the former, Elkinar’s status had been inherently inferior. Now there was only one God and one religion for all of Hagardis: no matter which city or town one visited, Ravennis-Elkinar was supreme. All theology aside, there was no reason for Elkinar’s priests to yearn for the old days.
Father Lepidos himself was one such priest. Formerly the senior Elkinaran priest in Ardis, he had followed Mother Dinendra into the unified church without hesitation. Now that Mother Dinendra was gone, he and Ptera were Narky’s closest advisers.
Most helpfully, he could read. Neither Narky nor Ptera could, so they waited patiently while Lepidos gathered himself and read them the latest sedition out of Atuna.
“In the halls of God Most High kneels His servant, the lowly Ravennis. ‘Why have You called me here, my eternal Master? Have I offended your children, the Dragon Touched? Beat me a hundred thousand times if so, for they are more beloved to You.’
“‘Fear not, Ravennis, I have not called you here to punish you. But I am always jealous, and you have made Me more jealous than ever before. How has your following grown larger than Mine, when you are but My servant in the underworld and I am Lord Above All?’
“‘Why,’ says the lowly Ravennis, ‘do You not know? Have You spent so long in these heavens of Yours that only I, lowly servant, know Your children’s hearts? Listen, then, and I will tell you. Your children are so terrified of their mortality that they will always prize an afterlife above all else. If You make them choose between worshipping their true Creator and worshipping the one who will guard their souls after death, precious few will choose the Creator. They would rather lose their lives securing a better place in my realm.’”
Narky interrupted the priest’s reading. “What is this we’re listening to? It’s nothing like Sephas’ usual stuff.”
“No,” Father Lepidos agreed. “This is new to him, this blasphemous satire. It’s not in his usual style.”
“Are we sure it is him? Could it be someone else?”
“Certainly,” the priest acknowledged, “but who?”
“Whoever wrote it,” Ptera said, “they don’t just hate Ravennis, they have contempt for His followers and for God Most High too. If it’s not Sephas, it’s probably one of his followers.”
“Right,” said Narky. “That’s got to be it: not Sephas, but one of his people.”
“It’s disgusting,” Ptera added.
Narky waved the priest on. “Read the rest of it.”
“‘They would rather lose their lives securing their places in my realm,’” Lepidos repeated, finding his place. “‘That is the way of humanity.’
“The Dotard On High rises from His throne in anger. ‘You think these creatures would give up their only lives in the world they know, all for the dubious hope that you will favor them in an afterlife they have never seen? It is absurd, Ravennis.’
“Ravennis answers, ‘I know them better than You, Lord, for they are like me: greedy and insatiable creatures. Just as I am always reaching for more than is my share, a single life will never be enough for them. They will do anything for more.’
“But God Most High, slow of action and of thought, does not punish insatiable Ravennis for his greed. He only says, ‘I must see this for Myself, if it is true. Watch, Ravennis. I will test this unearned faith in your afterlife, and We shall see if a few precious moments of life do not outweigh it.’”
Lepidos stopped there and rolled up the scroll, holding it with just the tips of his fingers like some filthy item that he wished he could drop.
“That’s it?” Narky asked. “It ends just like that?”
“Yes, that’s the end of it.”
A test of faith. Oh, Gods. The scroll was undoubtedly blasphemous, but what if there was still truth to it? Had Sephas or one of his followers been divinely inspired?
“When did this start going around?” Narky asked. “It didn’t come straight to us from the author, obviously. How far has it spread, do you think? And was it written before the quake or after?”
The priest shook his head. “It doesn’t seem to have spread very far yet – this copy came to us from Father Corvus in Atuna, which is where I assume it was written either just before the quake or just after. After, I should think, based on the way it ends.”
“I hope so.”
Ptera saw what Narky was thinking and said, “It’s not prophetic, Narky. It’s blasphemous and vulgar and Sephan.”
“But Sephas didn’t write it. It sounds nothing like him.”
“It’s his premise though,” Father Lepidos said. “The notion that Ravennis is a usurper and God Most High a fool sounds very much like Sephas, even if he has never written satires before. He doesn’t see that he is fighting against his own living God, not avenging a dead one.”
“Is it so hard to believe that he’s recruited a second writer to his side?” Ptera asked Narky. “Atuna is full of playwrights and people like that.”
She was right, that was the most likely explanation. The trouble was that Narky had always secretly believed in the Sephan premise of Ravennis as usurper. Ptera knew it, and she was trying to protect him.
“True,” he said, after a moment’s hesitation. “It’s just the timing, right around when the quake hit… the Gods are definitely watc
hing our response. This ‘test’ thing doesn’t seem so far off, and if some God is feeding Sephas prophetic knowledge, it could be a very, very big problem. It’s bad enough that he’s being sheltered by the Atunaeans. If he’s also getting help from Atun, say, we could be in for another war.”
Lepidos raised his eyebrows. “Over a text like this, the Dragon Touched might well join our cause.”
“They really might,” Narky admitted. “And if they did, it would be our best chance to end the Sephan heresy for good. I’ll bring it up with the king. Thanks, Lepidos. I’ll take that scroll.”
When the priest had gone, Narky sat down beside his wife. “I’ll have to talk to Criton about this. The king first, but then Criton.”
He couldn’t keep the reluctance out of his voice. Ptera put a hand on his thigh and asked him what was wrong. “Criton is your friend, and it’s been ages since we saw him. What’s the matter? Did he do something to offend you?”
“He married Delika. I can’t even think about him anymore without feeling dirty.”
She withdrew her hand in surprise. “Because he married her?”
“You don’t find it disgusting?”
“Why should I? He’s as close as the Dragon Touched have to a king – let him marry whoever he likes, especially someone who loves him.”
Narky had to suppress a wave of nausea. How could his brilliant wife not see? It must be her Ardisian upbringing. Growing up worshipping the God of the Wild must have prepared her to accept all kinds of barbarism.
Ptera saw the expression on his face, and still pressed on. “Don’t look like that, Narky, their age difference isn’t unreasonable.”
“Of course it is.”
Now she glared at him. Narky realized too late that this argument wasn’t just about Criton and his new wife – it was about him and Ptera too. Oh, Lord Below. How ridiculous. Sure, there were some eight and a half years between Narky and Ptera, but there was a difference.