Priestess of the Dragons' Temple

Chapter 4: Gaps in the Walls-1

Chapter 4: Gaps in the WallsThe ancient histories do not concern themselves with rivalries among priestesses, but even in the first generations petitioners and politics held sway in the audience court. For one who knows where to look, their echoes are everywhere.

– The Chronicles of Theranis

I’m going out,” Darna told Ganie as they they walked to the mid-morning meal together, arm in arm just as they had when they were novices.

Myril frowned. “Is it safe for you?”

Darna shrugged. “I should be fine.” The prince had certainly gone back to Tiadun already. “You could come with me, if you’d like,” she told Myril.

“I think I’ll just stay here for now,” Myril said. “I can go up to the library for a while to read.”

“The Aralel gave me a text to study,” Iola said. “Could you help me with it?”

Darna hoped Myril didn’t notice how forced Iola’s request sounded.

“I could,” Myril agreed as if she hadn’t heard anything amiss. “We could sit in the library.”

“Oh, I thought maybe we could go up to the tower,” Iola said.

Myril shuddered. Darna glared at Iola. She might be closer to the dragons than any priestess in a hundred years, but could she at least consider Myril?

“Did you three hear about that girl Taira?” Ganie said. “The one who used to be in Iola’s new chamber?”

“No,” Darna said, glad to encourage the change of subject.

“They say she took a copy of one of the temple scrolls and let a petitioner see it!” Ganie said breathlessly. “Can you imagine?”

“But could he read?” Myril wondered aloud. Most men couldn’t.

Ganie shook her head. “Not very well, but enough to puzzle out that it was a listing of some treasure or other. The next day another petitioner came to her and asked about it, and then one of them asked Sunna where the temple treasury was, as if they could get to it if they tried. We can’t have them crawling all over the temple looking for it!”

“I can’t imagine!” Iola gasped. The four of them paused at the refectory door.

“So anyway that’s why she’s not a peresi any more,” Ganie said. “I didn’t hear about the scandal until last night. Lenasa told me.”

“Oh, Lenasa.” Darna rolled her eyes. “And who did she hear it from, Tiagasa?”

As if summoned, Tiagasa appeared around the corner and pushed past them into the refectory.

Darna reddened with embarrassment. Lenasa seemed all right, as far as princes’ kin went, but she didn’t have her finger on everyone’s pulse like Tiagasa did. The second gong sounded for the morning meal and they all arrived at their table just in time to join in the morning chant.

Bright sun of blessing, shine on us today.

Let forth the light from the caverns of the earth.

Let your rays illumine our place of dwelling.

Let your fires grace our table with bounty,

And let us return your due,

On this good day dawning.

Normally Darna didn’t mind Ganie and her gossip, but today she wished that Ganie had left well enough alone. She and Lenasa sat next to each other, across from Savasa. Savasa was looking at the novices as if she wished she were back in the dormitory and not a peresi at all. She’d hardly taken any petitioners since Midsummer night. Apparently whoever Tiagasa had sent her hadn’t been what she’d hoped for. Meanwhile, Myril held herself stiffly, leaning away from Iola’s forced overtures of friendship.

Darna mused over the morning blessing as she ate. The bit about dawn had always bothered her. Since the peresi often worked until late at night their morning meal was served well past sunrise, after the time when scrapplings got their bread during trading season. It was almost midday, not dawn at all. As a novice, she’d been glad of the chance to sleep late, but the reference to dawning had always seemed out of place.

The moment the meal ended Darna hurried out to avoid talking to the other priestesses. She entered the short walkway toward the back courtyard and was surprised to see Honored Geta limping toward her carrying a heavy wooden tray – the bread tray for the scrapplings.

“Help me with this, will you, girl?” she said.

Darna took the tray out of Geta’s frail grip. She could barely carry it herself. “This is very heavy!” she said.

“So it is, girl, so it is.”

“I’m not a novice anymore,” Darna said.

“I know it,” said Geta, “but you’re all girls to me.” She trailed Darna into the kitchen and over to the bread ovens. When the tray was back on its rack, Darna dusted the crumbs off her fine robes. It was one of the scrappling bread trays, she was sure of it.

“Isn’t it –” Darna began. “Shouldn’t the scrapplings be back in the countryside, or in guilds by now?”

Geta shook her head and sighed. “Should be,” she said, “but they’re not. Last year, three of them stayed on through harvest. They mostly begged and didn’t come to the temples for bread, but this year there are a dozen, and they say the begging is too thin. We can’t let them waste away now, can we?”

“No, but…” Something about the news troubled Darna.

“I hear you’re going out,” Geta said, as if she didn’t want to talk about the scrapplings either.

Geta heard everything. She was almost as bad as Myril that way.

“Let me know if you hear anything we should know, especially about the scrapplings,” Geta said. “I’ll take it straight to the Aralel herself, I will.”

Darna curtsied as she had when she was a novice, and Geta dismissed her with a wave of her cane.

§

Iola contemplated the statue of Salara from her empty offering place. Salara was a small, fleet dragon, and though some said she was the runt of Theranis, she too had power. She had felt it from all the way across Na’s mountains when she’d lain down in this place. She’d been feeling it for days now. It welled up through the stone dais as the men brought their offerings – themselves – to her and to the dragons. She closed her eyes and meditated, but with no petitioner coming, no one to stir the earth’s fire to life inside her, it seemed meaningless. She was alone with the very distant echoes of the dragons’ power. Why wouldn’t the Aralel let her go on? She’d been doing so well, almost happy for the first time since she’d entered the temple, maybe for the first time ever.

She’d slept soundly the night before, straight through until the morning meal. Now she wondered what the other peresi did all day. She wasn’t even supposed to go help teach the novices until almost sunset. Until then, there was nothing to do. She gathered up some of her clothes, so many of them, and put them in a basket for the launderers. She didn’t know who washed them. The novices never met the launderers, though Darna said that she’d stumbled on them in one of her nighttime wanderings. They’d all had sleepless nights. Darna said that the launderers were a secretive, hereditary guild that held all the secrets of Anamat’s waterways.

Iola hadn’t really been listening then, but now she wondered. She tidied up the rest of her linens. The peresi all had three sets of presentation robes for when they met petitioners and another three sets of everyday clothes, simple dark red tunics with reddish-brown robes to go over them. Iola put on one of the everyday tunics and a robe. The cloth was plain but good quality, a soft, sturdy weave, not glorious like the silky fluid fabric of the better robes. She picked up her basket of laundry and took it up the stairs.

At the far end of the courtyard, Lenasa, Savasa, and Tiagasa sat near the locked gate to the ambassadress’s quarters, huddled around something, inspecting it.

“Ooo!” Savasa cried. “It’s gorgeous!”

“Well…” Tiagasa looked up and around the courtyard. When she saw Iola, she turned back to the other two and said something in a whisper. They tittered, then flocked into one of the rooms.

Iola set down her laundry. She wasn’t even sure where she was supposed to take it, or if maybe the elders would come collect it as they had for the novices. She went over to Sunna’s doorway.

“Sunna?” she called. “Are you in there?”

Iola heard a grunt and a moment later Sunna emerged from under the stairs, wearing only a long white towel. “What is it?” she asked.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” Iola said. “I was just wondering: where are we supposed to take our laundry?”

“I’ll show you. It’s near the baths.”

“I could take a bath!” That would be something to do. “I’ll come with you,” Iola said.

Sunna started to say something but Iola was already halfway back to her chamber and didn’t hear it. She pulled off her plain, drab robes and wrapped herself in a crisp length of white linen toweling. It felt better than the drab red robe, and looked better, too. She hurried out to rejoin Sunna who looked a little impatient.

“You know, I’m not your teacher anymore,” Sunna said as she set off.

“I do know,” Iola said, “but you’ve always been kind.”

“Humph. You make me sound like a granny. I’m not as old as all that. I was only a peresi for two years before your group came along.”

“You are older than us, though,” Iola said. “And you do know things, like – ” She stopped abruptly. Darna had said something about Sunna and Thorat. She missed Thorat. She’d been trying not to think of him when those other men had come, and for the most part she’d succeeded, but she couldn’t help but wonder what it would have been like, what it would be like, when he came.

When she’d seen him last, really seen him and touched him, something had passed between them, something that absence could not undo, nothing like what happened with the petitioners when she was only a vessel for the dragons. Their souls had joined, she knew it. She missed him terribly. And something had changed in her. Before she’d met him, the dragons were always there with her, then it was as if she’d left them with him, with Thorat.

“But I do know where the laundry is, at least,” Sunna said.

“Oh!” Iola startled. She’d been following Sunna without paying any attention to where they were going. They entered a low tunnel, more roughly hewn than the way down to the baths. She could hear someone splashing through a doorway behind them. “I forgot what we were doing,” she said.

Sunna ignored her. They came to a broad chamber with a vaulted ceiling that curved all the way down to the floor. Like the low tunnel, it was plain and cave-like. A canal ran through it.

“Leave your soiled things here,” Sunna said. “They’ll know whose it is by the basket. You’re in Salara’s chamber. Interesting. I think someone is trying – ”

“Trying what?” Iola asked, placing a hand on Sunna’s arm.

Sunna brushed her off, rather forcefully. “I shouldn’t say anything. I’ve shown you the laundry, now off to the baths with you.”

Iola looked around. She’d come in through one tunnel, but there were others, and she wasn’t quite sure which one they’d emerged from.

Sunna sighed. “Come on then.” She led the way out of the strange laundry room and back through the leftmost tunnel.

Iola tried to remember the route, but she was fairly sure that she was going to have to ask someone to show her the way back out. She followed Sunna into the baths, hanging her towel on a hook just inside.

The baths were one of the things about the temple that Iola had always delighted in, even when she hadn’t seen a dragon in years. The bathing chambers were large, bright-tiled caverns under the courtyards. Light filtered down through wells set around the gardens casting a low, even glow over the water, making everything look smooth and beautiful.

Even in the diffuse light she could see the purple mark on Sunna’s torso, on one side of her ribs.

“What happened?” Iola gasped.

Sunna turned to look at the bruise and winced. “It’s nothing,” she said. “The healers say it will be fine by next full moon.”

“How, though? Did a man – ”

Sunna laughed. “No, no, nothing like that. We wouldn’t allow that here.” She paused. “At least not more than once, and I don’t allow it at all. In any case, this was just a… a kind of an accident. Nothing to worry about. I have plenty of things to keep me busy while I heal up.”

Iola wasn’t satisfied with that answer, but she wasn’t good at prying. She would learn eventually if the dragons wanted her to know. She slipped into the bath, letting the dragon-warmed waters caress her. She felt the jagged energies of the past few days drain away, jagged energies that she hadn’t even realized she was carrying. Maybe she did need to take more time in between petitioners.