In the Ruins (Crown of Stars #6)

In the Ruins (Crown of Stars #6) Page 192

“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.