Elizabeth Haydon - Destiny - Child of the Sky

For a full week of the cycle, the water flowed copiously. On the first day of the blast, known as the Awakening, the townspeople would gather to thank the All-God in ritual prayer but refrained from actually drinking or collecting the Wellspring’s liquid bounty. Part of this was a sacrificial abstinence in thanks to the Creator, but part of it was the rule of common sense as well; initially, the force of the water rushing forth from Entudenin was similar to a raging rapid, more than sufficient to break a man’s back.

Within one turn of day the water flow would subside to a voluminous spray. The legends said that there was a noticeable change in the Wellspring’s attitude, from anger to placidity. Once this change had occurred, the people of Yarim Paar and eventually its neighbors would quickly begin harvesting the water, storing it in cisterns that ranged from the enormous fountainbed that had been built at the obelisk’s base to the small vessels carried by the town’s children on their heads. The spray that filled the air at the outskirts of the waterspout rained down in a wide sweep, and was used by the townspeople as a public bath.

After the Week of Plenty came the Week of Rest. Entudenin subsided from its joyful shower into a calmer, bubbling flow. The more patient townspeople who had planned ahead and therefore could wait until the second week to obtain their water benefited from their forbearance, because this was the time when the water was said to be the sweetest, purged of the sour minerals that had built up during its sleeping time.

The third week, the Week of Loss, still saw water coming forth from Entudenin, but it had dwindled to a mere trickle. During this time only those with desperate illness in their households were allowed to collect water from the Fountain Rock. Unlike the raucous harvest of the first two weeks, any such collection was done reverently, with great humility, and at considerable expense in the form of a donation of food or coinage to the priestesses who guarded Entudenin.

Finally, the trickle would vanish. The Fountain Rock would go dry, and this week, the Week of Slumber, was a time when a sense of apprehension bordering on dread would come over Yarim Paar, at least according to the legends. Though the geyser had been erupting cyclically with its gift for as long as anyone could remember, there was always an unspoken fear that each time might be the last. And while the Yarimese had managed to trust the sun and moon to follow the patterns the All-God had laid out for them without a second thought, there was always a fear that Entudenin might change her mind, might abandon her children to the dust of the wasteland around them if anything gave her offense.

The task of tending to the Wellspring was entrusted to a clan known as the Shanouin, a band of former nomads that were said to have come originally from Kurimah Milani. The Shanouin water-priestesses were accorded the highest social status in Yarim, second only to the line of the duke and the benison that Yarim shared with the neighboring province of Canderre. Because Entudenin followed a monthly cycle it was believed to have a female outlook, and so only the Shanouin women were allowed the actual task of cleaning and maintaining the obelisk in its rest, as well as managing the access of the townspeople to the Wellspring. The men and children of the clan were accorded the tasks of basin-building and water delivery to the more important households; the Shanouin carter who brought monthly water vessels to the house of the duke was accorded a position even higher than that of the royal chamberlain.

When centuries passed and the Erim Rus became contaminated with the Blood Fever, and the tributary of the Tar’afel went dry, Entudenin remained stalwart, constant, nurturing the dry realm with the elixir of life, twenty days out of every moon-cycle. The verdant desert gardens that had grown up in Yarim Paar were allowed to wither in order to divert some of the Wellspring’s water to the outlying towns and villages, and the opal outposts and mineral mining camps as well. The paradise that Yarim Paar had become settled into a more staid, sensible city, a comely matron taking the place of the once ravishingly beautiful bride.

And so it went, month after month, year after year, century after century for millennia uncounted until the day that Entudenin went to sleep and did not awaken.

At first the Shanouin had cautioned composure. The Wellspring had not been perfect in the marking of its cycles, though no one at the time could remember it ever deviating from its routine by more than three days. When the fourth day passed, then the fifth, however, the Blesser of Canderre-Yarim was summoned by avian messenger from his basilica in Bethany to Yarim Paar, in the hope that perhaps his divine wisdom, endowed by the Creator through the Patriarch, would be able to determine the cause of Entudenin’s silence, and perhaps make amends for whatever offense had been committed.

The benison came in all due haste, riding his desert stallion in the company of but eight guards, rather than resorting to the slower method of the royal caravan. By the time he arrived from Bethany the Wellspring had been dry for ten days, and there was widespread consternation bordering on panic, not only in Yarim Paar, but in the other Yarimese cities and outposts as well, since all of them depended upon the water of Entudenin for sustenance. That panic soon had spread to the other provinces of Roland, because many of the Orlandan dukes had holdings and financial interests in Yarim.

When the benison was unable to summon the life back into the Wellspring with his prayers to the Patriarch, much of the population of Yarim began reverting from the monotheistic practices of the religion of Sepulvarta, the Patriarch, and his benisons back to the pagan polytheism that had been their creed before the Cymrians came. Sacrifices, both public and private, benign and malevolent, were offered to the goddess of the Earth, to the Lord of the Sea, to the god of water, to any and every possible deity that might have taken offense, in the hope that whatever divine entity would listen might call off the curse of thirst. The pleas fell on deaf ears all the way around.

Finally the finger pointed. Word swept through the town that it was the Shanouin who were to blame; Entudenin’s handmaidens had displeased her, had caused her to withdraw from her people. The water-priestesses and the rest of their clan escaped Yarim Paar by night as the brushy scrub for their pyres was being collected. But even with the departure of the Shanouin, Entudenin still remained unmoved, still refused to open her heart.

When murderous rioting broke out over control of the drying cisterns, the city of Yarim Paar, under the hand of the duke, settled back into sullen silence and contemplated how it would survive now that the water was gone. A halfhearted attempt at well-digging was made, then quickly abandoned; no one alive had ever undertaken such a task, so no one knew how, having lived all their lives with Entudenin tending to their water needs like a generous wet-nurse. In addition, even if they had known how to pierce the dry earth, doing it in a place that would produce water was as likely as finding a specific grain of flax in a ten-stone sack. What water there might be crept so far beneath the sand that it might as well be on the other side of the earth for all the tunneling required to reach it.

At last it occurred to the duke that the Shanouin, while they might have displeased the Wellspring, were the repository of knowledge about water in this arid climate. He sent forth his army to round up the entire tribe and had them herded back to Yarim, where they then met in council with him, the magistrate of Yarim Paar, the supervisors of the various mining camps, and the officials of the other Yarimese cities.