CHAPTER 15

 

 

Caravans traveled along different roads. They clung closer to the waters to trade for fish from the boys that lived near the shore in the spiraling shantytowns. These young dervishes of mud jump to the roadside with their hands waving overhead. They held them up and shouted for the caravan driver. The driver kept fishhooks in a small sack. He traded two hooks for each good fish.

Past the merging rivers, the pebbled shoreline grows a rocky shell. Young oyster divers leap nude into the surf to gather supper to feed the fullers in the wool factory who stripped lanolin from the sheets of wool in ammoniac tents.

The end of winter, the sheep faced their fate in the mouth of the shears. The wool, too rich in oily lanolin to roll into decent yarn, has to dance with the fullers.

The liver and ammonia stink of weeks-old urine hung in the air. The caravan driver burned pine cones in a bucket, and he held it up in the air. They cracked and snapped in the heat, but they burned the edge of the smell out of the air.

Djoss asked him why he moved this way.

The caravan driver said that raiders kept away from the fullers, on account of the stink. Further north, past the city, nothing mattered.

North and north for weeks, and then they turned east.

And that is where my husband and I encountered the caravan, at the edge of the fullers, with the stink of the demon in his cart, where Rachel rode. He told us of his escape from a raider camp, and how lucky he was for the porter’s Senta sister.

 

***

 

Another koan felt in the slanting light of an empty room. Rachel’s voice echoed in Jona’s mind.

A Senta student asked the master if the prayers of the faithful reached the ears of the Gods. The master snorted at his student. Of course not. The prayers need only reach the ears of the one praying.

Jona stared at Rachel’s naked neck. He hoped his prayers reached his father’s soul, in the bowels of Elishta. Then, he pushed the hope aside.

Rachel wondered aloud if her prayers aimed to the nameless, unseen deities that had fallen from the clouds ignored, and fallen into the unholy pits of the planet. Her hand reached up to the ceiling and down in an arc like a meteor.

If so, she whispered, I pray that all of the Nameless demons kill themselves and leave your children alone. We want no part of your selfish ways.