David Drake - Godess of the Ice Realm

Tenoctris had lived a long life before the cataclysm scooped her up, but she'd already brought more to the present than she'd been allowed to give her own day. Without her wisdom and skill, Cashel knew that the present kingdom, reborn with Garric leading, would have vanished like chaff in a bonfire.

The old woman sniffed as she knelt to look more closely at a stone bench. "I don't accept your notion of purpose, Cashel," she said. "I believe in chance, and I believe in the forces that I can see and sense; but I've never seen the gods you pray to."

Cashel grinned. "Chance?" he said. "You mean luck? Then I guess Garric and me and everybody else in the Isles who wants to live a normal life without wizards smashing things is awfully lucky, seeings as you just happened to appear right where we needed you to keep everything from flying apart again."

Tenoctris laughed as she ran her fingers over the moss-covered carvings on the top of the bench. "Cashel, just as you have faith in the Great Gods," she said, "I have faith in the blind machinery of the cosmos. Sometimes, I'll admit-"

She turned to meet his eyes, laughing with a serious undertone.

"-I have to stretch farther to justify my beliefs than I would yours."

Cashel smiled, holding his quarterstaff out at arm's length just for exercise. He wasn't bragging, though he knew there weren't many men who could grip the end of the thick staff in one hand and keep it straight. Cashel didn't have to brag about his strength; it was there for all to see, as surely as Sharina's beauty.

Tenoctris was giving her full attention to the bench, now. "Cashel," she said, "this is very old. It was part of an altarstone, originally."

"Brought here from an old temple, you mean?" he said. He looked more closely at the bench, but that was just politeness. The marks on the stone wouldn't have meant anything to him if they'd been clear. Now, worn by time and under a fur of moss, he'd have had as much luck trying to read words in the wave-tops.

"I'm not sure," said Tenoctris, eyeing the rest of the garden from where she knelt. "Those seats there-"

She nodded toward chairs made by cutting down sections of a fluted pillar; her fingertips continued to touch indentations in the top of the bench.

"-are made out of column barrels, and there on the wall-"

Nodding again, this time toward the partition between this garden and its twin in the east wing. Blocks of sandstone formed the foundation, though the rest was old brick.

"-are parts of a frieze. See the triglyphs?"

Cashel wouldn't have known a triglyph if it bit him, but he supposed some part of what he was looking at was a triglyph. Maybe even a family of them.

"I think there was a temple here before the palace was built," Tenoctris continued. She rose, frowning. "I think the inscription's to the Lady, though I'm more guessing than reading."

Cashel cleared his throat. He had the staff in both hands, now. He could hear the concern in Tenoctris' voice. He didn't understand what was causing it, but he was ready for anything that appeared.

"Sharina'll be back soon, I think," he said as his companion continued to ponder the bench. "Can she help you read, do you think, Tenoctris?"

Sharina'd gone off to the temple of the Lady to pray as soon as the formalities of greeting the locals were over. She hadn't asked Cashel to let her go without his company, but they knew each other pretty well by now. Her friend Nonnus had worshipped the Lady, and Cashel figured this visit had something to do with him. That was Sharina's private business.

Tenoctris laughed and put her hand over Cashel's where it gripped his quarterstaff. "I didn't mean to disturb you," she said with a hint of embarrassment. "There's nothing wrong, nothingevil, about there being a temple here. It's just that places where people worship tend to focus the forces that turn the cosmos. Reusing the sites for other purposes is, well, dangerous."

She pursed her lips in sour expression though her eyes continued to smile. "As are quite a lot of other things, I know," she went on, "including worrying myself into a tizzy because everybody else doesn't feel the same way I do about what I think is important. And-"

She turned again to survey their surroundings, her hands on her hips.

"-when I let myself think about it instead of just reacting on instinct, there're few more innocent uses for the site than as a quiet garden. Forgive me for being silly, Cashel."

"I don't think you're silly, Tenoctris," Cashel said. His voice was a trifle huskier than it'd have been if he was completely settled, and though he held the staff at his side again, he hadn't forgotten about it.

A shepherd learns that instinct can warn him about a lot of things that his conscious mind could never explain to other people. And Cashel knew Tenoctris well enough by now to trust her instincts just as far as he did his own.

There were probably other temples to the Lady in Carcosa, but the nomenclator Sharina had asked sent her to that of the Lady of the Sunset. It stood on a knoll near the northern wall of the city. She hadn't been able to see the temple itself from the harbor, but the gilded bronze statuary on its roof blazed above all the surrounding buildings.

"Huh!" snorted one of the Blood Eagles escorting her. "This is what the hicks call a temple, is it?"

"Shut up, Lires, or you'll be sweeping out stables with your moustache!" snarled the lieutenant commanding the squad. "She's here to worship and you're here to guard her while she's doing it!"

Sharina pretended not to have been listening, but the soldier's comment angered her on many levels. The temple wasn't large, certainly not by the standards of Valles or ancient Carcosa, but it was perfectly proportioned and had been built by expert craftsmen. The life-sized statues on the roof were winged dancers, probably meant for the four phases of the West Wind; they were modeled as ably as anything Sharina had seen in the capital.

The temple had six slim columns across the front, two more than normal on a width of 35 feet or so. The design gave the building a look of airiness, and the ceiling-high glass panels-diamond panes set in silvered bronze instead of lead-lighted the interior as well as displaying the cult statue to those sacrificing outside.

Nothing but Ornifal chauvinism could object to the temple, and Sharina was from Haft. More important, though-shehad come here to worship, just as the officer said.

Sharina'd been raised to be conventionally religious, since a peasant community doesn't have much scope for complete surrender to the Gods. A farmer who spent all his days praying would starve when winter came, and his neighbors would have as little sympathy for him as they did for his drunken neighbor.

Her mother Lora mouthed platitudes with the same empty formality as she taught Sharina court etiquette: it was the done thing. Reise said nothing about how he felt regarding the Gods; people in general found it politic to conceal their opinions around Lora unless they wanted to listen to her diatribes on where their beliefs were mistaken. Sharina suspected that her father was as much an unbeliever as Ilna declared herself to be, but he'd paid his share when the priests from Carcosa made their annual Tithe Procession and he'd raised his children to offer a pinch of bread dipped in ale at meals to the shrine on the wall of the inn's common room.

Nonnus the hermit was the only person Sharina knew to whom the Lady was a real part of life. Perhaps even to Nonnus She was only a hope, the possibility that Someone could forgive the things he had done as a soldier. For Nonnus' sake, Sharina had come here to pray and to sacrifice. No one had a right to sneer at that impulse.

But she held her tongue-as Nonnus would have done.