Jay Lake - Endurance

Soak I did until I slept. The water was so hot my muscles did not knot.

I rested two days in another tent, in truth sulking while people chattered, laughed, and labored outside. Sister Gammage or Chowdry brought me lentils and watered milk, for the baby. My gut would suddenly tolerate nothing else. Where had these food sicknesses come from?

Also at my request I’d been provided with boys’ clothing. The robe was a silly idea, proven pointless. I refused to return to the leathers, was all but ready to be shut of them completely; so brown corduroy breeches, canvas shirt, low sturdy workboots, and wide, flat cap seemed far more practical. There was even a quilted cotton jacket adequate at least to the autumn chill. I could run roofs, tumble through dirt, and, best of all, attract no attention whatsoever while dressed as an everyday youth of this city.

Well, except for my dark skin and the slashed scars upon my cheeks, but one thing at a time. Perhaps some profession here wore masks or veils I could adopt without causing comment. Beekeepers? Temple virgins?

In the meantime, I hid my leathers and my good fighting boots in a bundle beneath a pile of stones between the tent complex and the wall. I wrapped them carefully in waxed linen, then tent canvas, and scattered herbs within the folds to keep off the molder. I did not know how long I might need the Blade costume to wait in secret for me, but it required care much as anyone or anything else might.

Best of all, no one bothered me. Whoever was looking for me-the Interim Council, the Kalimpuri embassy-Chowdry and his people were having none of it. I had not yet been to see the ox god, but I was certainly under his protection. Much as I had been as a small child, and likewise down the years since.

This situation was not so restful as being at Ilona’s cottage had proven, but it was peace enough to be worth my while. Still, I knew events moved in the city. The ghost Erio had been worried about what might happen here soon. Regardless of my usual opinion of the ancient dead, that one had been lucid, focused, and afraid of something.

Mostly the baby needed me to rest. I tried to keep relatively still and calm, let my back ease up, my shoulder heal, all my bruises fade, and the stitches on my arm be reduced from weeping pink fluid to a horrid scratching that smelled faintly of the gin that Sister Gammage splashed on the wound every few hours.

Gin and hot baths, they seemed to be the entirety of her book of healing. Well, that and stitches. Definitely my kind of woman.

On my third morning, the lentils did not satisfy, and my own laziness was beginning to irritate me. When restfulness became a problem, it was no longer a solution, as the Lily Blades liked to say. I rose, gathered my belled silk and adjusted my boy’s clothing, then headed out to find better fare. I needed to be well-fed before I could square accounts with my ox god. The baby did not seem to mind, and my appetite was drawn to the crackling smell of sausages on a fire nearby.

“Mother Green!” said a cheerful young man who looked Selistani and sounded Stone Coast. He appeared vaguely familiar-one of the drawers of water for my bath two days ago? He also held a large, flat pan covered with the sizzling meat.

“I am no one’s mother,” I snapped. Not true, of course. And it was better than “Lady Green.” “But I have a mother of a hunger.”

“Take a place.” He pointed to a long wide wooden table under a thin canvas roof where a dozen young people, mixed Selistani and Petraean, sat wearing undyed linen robes, chattering happily as they ate their way through scrambled eggs, sausage, and chunks of brown bread.

This was so utterly unlike the refectory at the Temple of the Silver Lily that I had to gawk a moment. All the aspirants there had lived with intense discipline, not just the Blades. Here the atmosphere was more that of a fair, or a camp. Children playing at ritual for a lark, not serious acolytes. Not at all like my poor Septio had been, either.

I shook off my mood and laughed. “Sit? No. You sit!” I gently shoved him aside from his pan and took over the cooking. They had a decent selection of spices, and I called for cheese and white wine to enrich the eggs. If only I could have remade the bread…

A hot stove in front of me, a pan in my hands-these things much improved my spirit. Cooking absorbed my energy and calmed my spirit awhile. I fed Endurance’s young acolytes until I could resist the smell no more, then loaded my own crockery plate and found a place among them while the boy resumed cooking, somewhat educated and chastened both.

I ate so much that eventually most of the acolytes stopped talking and watched me shovel food in. The baby seemed happy, and so did my stomach. I would not waste the opportunity.

Finally I pushed aside my fifth serving. The young cook began to clap. After an embarrassed moment, the rest of them did so, too. There was nothing for it but to rise and take my bow. At least I was properly fed. “I have been called before the god,” I told them, and headed off through the tents toward the small wooden temple.

As I walked past the foundation markers of Chowdry’s larger ambitions-for I was sure Endurance did not so much care about his temple-I realized what my friend the priest had meant about the god calling him. Two days I’d lain in my tent, but when it was time to rise and go forth, I had risen and gone forth unquestioningly.

I stopped at the front, still not quite ready to mount the steps. The facade was a very plain, rough-ripped wood framed up competently enough. The interior would be cold in winter, for there was no chinking between the planks, and I did not think they had placed anything behind it. I wondered if Chowdry planned to lay a course of bricks or daub-and-wattle over the exposed wood.

“Enough,” I said aloud as I slipped my cloak of bells over my shoulder. How else to approach the ox that had carried my grandmother to her funeral at the beginning of my days? I had nothing to be afraid of.

Did I?

That answer came to me as I mounted the steps: Endurance had been Papa’s ox. Not mine. Somehow I was returning to the presence of my father, who’d sold me as a girl, and must have died long since of whatever rotting of the mind had already claimed him when I’d found him once more these four years past.

The image of Shar, his second wife, sprang unbidden to my mind. So ragged, so afraid of me.

With that thought, I passed within, the music of my birthplace jingling with each stride. The doorway was obscured by a curtain of beads. The room beyond could have held thirty or forty close-packed worshippers at most, and smelled of incense and people’s feet. This was the whole of it-there was no space for priestly chambers or tiring rooms or secret dungeons. A life-sized marble statue of an ox kneeling on the ground occupied the far end, opposite the door. Straw scattered about the ox and the rough beams over my head finally cued me to the nature of this temple.

It was a stable.

Endurance’s followers had put him in a stable.

I had to laugh at that as I approached the statue. Back in the half-remembered days of my youth, Endurance had lived outside. By the time of my ill-fated visit four years ago, someone had built the ox a small hut to shelter in. But a stable?

Ribbons had been tied to the ox horns. Some had slips of paper dangling from them, others curls of ash. I leaned forward and turned a scrap in my hands. help aunt jem for her crab disese

Prayers, then. Given most directly to the god. Some sped on their way with a little offering of flame. Narrow, long trays of sand held dozens of burnt incense sticks just below the statue’s nose. That struck me as a bit odd-I did not think that Copper Downs worshipped so. This was a Selistani god. Plates of fruit and dried-up bread were scattered among the incense holders, around the god’s knees.