Shadowplay

CELL 12

A house was burning, small, thatched roof; someone, it sounded like a small girl, was trapped inside screaming as she died very very slowly. A woman was shrieking and struggling In the arms of several men who were themselves cursing and weeping as they kept her from running back into the house.

A young woman pulled herself with furious agility onto the back of the stony riding beast of an equestrian statue, stood there declaiming verses in a powerful contralto, angry, satiric verses that brought cheers from the crowd of listeners drawn by her voice, shouts of go go go! until black-clad, half-armored guards came raging through the crowd, slamming their clubs into any part of anybody within reach. The poet jumped from the statue and vanished into the throng before the guards reached her.

Singing in a basso drone OP PAL LAN OP PAL LAH TIN OP PAL OP PAL LA TIN OP PAL OP PAL LAH TIN adouble line of long haired men In beaded robes hauled sacks of grain, beans and other dried foods into a stone pyramid with a massive plank door. The pyramid was one of a long line of caches built along a broad unpaved road that stretched from horizon to horizon across a sea of silver-green grass, an endless, dramatic sky arching overhead. The POV moved on along that broad, unchanging track bisecting the Plains of Kwamitaskwen, showing more lines of the tapwit priests provisioning more pyramids as they got ready for the mass march of the people in the Pakoseo.