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His hands were wrapped in gauze that needed changing a dozen times a day. Mother Dark’s eyes saw through red tears and blotted linen, or, as was increasingly the case, they saw nothing at all, as he had taken to sliding his hands into the thick sleeves of his woollen robe, a habit the other priests now copied.
Behind him, in the Citadel, a plague had come, a kind of fever. In a body with nothing to do, the mind will dance. But that was the least of it. Some dances mapped steps into madness, with ferocious momentum. He was weary of the spies, the small groups huddled whispering in corners, the strange glances and guarded expressions. Even more tiring, beneath all that he was witness to roiled an undercurrent of fear, and that was difficult to swim against.
The future was a place of uncertain promise in the best of times, where hope and optimism warred with doubt and despair, and there were those who fought such battles in the streets, or in the home, with the enemy no longer the shadow in one’s own soul, but someone else – a neighbour, a wife or a husband, a liege or a peasant. Doubt is the enemy. Despair a weakness, and hope becomes not something to strive for, but a virtue eager to draw blood from every sceptic.
‘Turn me away from the unsightly!’ the optimists cry. ‘Yield this dream to joy, to revelry and laughter. Enough confabulation and noise to drown the distant cries of the suffering, to blind me to the world’s woes! What care I for tragedies not of my own making? Such things are beyond my control, anyway, and indeed beyond my ability to change.’
In many ways, Endest had no argument with such views. The heart’s capacity was finite. So people explained, again and again, to justify all that had grown cold and lifeless within them. If imagination had no limits, surely the soul did.
And yet, what thing of certain limit can in turn create something limitless? This seems a breaking of some fundamental law. The unbound from the bound, the infinite from the finite. How can such things be?
Eyes in his hands, to make witness to all that he did. He had set out in search of decency, and now, striding into the Winter Market, his own eyes watering to the sudden heat beneath the cloth roof, the redolent odours of myriad people, foodstuffs and animals. The first thing his gaze found was a wall of tiny wooden cages, stacked high, each cage home to a songbird.
There was no song in their voices. Instead, a cacophony of terrible stress and fear assailed him. As if of their own accord, his hands slid out from his sleeves.
A young man sat on a stool in front of the cages, grease on his lips and his fingers as he ate from a skewer of meat and vegetables. Seeing Endest Silann, he nodded. ‘Half to the temple, for the yo
ung women, but I was not expecting you for weeks yet.’ He indicated the cages behind him with a tilt of his head. ‘They save their songs for spring. Who would want these shrieks, hey?’
Endest Silann felt her then, his goddess, stealing into him, suddenly attentive, curious. ‘Where are they from?’ he asked.
The man shrugged. ‘The countryside, and to the south. Caught in fine nets during their migrations.’ He then made a face. ‘Getting fewer every year, though.’
‘And this is your living?’
The man shrugged. ‘It serves me well enough, priest.’
Endest’s followers had arrived by now, and others were drawing close, as if tasting something new in the air.
‘You make a living from the imprisonment of wild creatures.’
The man suddenly scowled, and stood up, tossing the skewer to the ground and wiping at his hands. ‘Not just me. Trappers, too. But it is not my coin that buys them, is it? If not for your own temple, priest, I might be a different man from the one you see here.’
‘And where is your own cage? The one in your skull.’
The scowl grew dark, menacing.
‘The one,’ Endest continued, ‘that traps your conscience?’
‘Look to your own for that!’
Other merchants and hawkers pushed closer now.
Endest held out his hands, watching as the bandages sagged, unfurled sodden to dangle and then slip down on to his wrists. He felt the blood welling, trickling down his palms.
The mongers before him backed away.
‘If only,’ Endest Silann said, ‘you gave her reason to fight.’ He glanced back over a shoulder and met the eyes of the nearest acolyte. ‘Take these cages back to the Citadel. All of them.’ Facing the hawker, he shook his head. ‘This is your last day here. You will be paid for these birds, but no more, and never again. In the name of Mother Dark, the capturing and selling of wild creatures is now forbidden.’
Voices rose in outrage.
The hawker bared his teeth. ‘Will you send soldiers after me, then? Because I will defy you—’
‘No, you will not. I understand you, sir, the pleasure you take from what you do, you hoarder of all you can never feel, or hope to feel.’
‘Mother Dark has no power – we all know as much! And your soldiers – Urusander will deal with them soon enough!’
‘You don’t understand,’ said Endest Silann, and as he said this, he realized that Mother Dark did not understand either. ‘I set out today, into this city, looking for decency. But I could not find it. It was all hidden away, behind walls, perhaps, withdrawn into intimate moments and the like.’ He shook his head. ‘In any case, I was mistaken in my search. The decency I was seeking was not the kind a mortal can see, but only feel.’
