Wild Magic

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The god-in-Faan deposited Faan’s body on her bed. “BE READY,” SHE said, the voice reverberating inside Faan’s head. “WHEN I ASK, GIVE. WITHOUT HESITATION AND WITHOUT STINT.”

The cyst about Faan dissolved and she was herself again, the god was gone.

She got to her feet, poured a cupful of water into the basin, and washed her face over and over until most of the water was gone. “It’s done,” she said aloud. “For better or worse, it’s done.”

She stripped, climbed into bed, and slept without dreaming for the first time in days.

Chapter 10. The Prophet Comes From The Hills To Disturb The Land

Faharmoy woke with Chumavayal’s Touch on his brow and knew it was time. His CALL had come.

‘No years ago he walked into the stony wilderness of the Konduni piedmont, leaving everything behind, renouncing his father and his family, renouncing power and personal glory.

He went hungry, froze at night, burned with thirst and was tormented by his own filth, by the assaults of insects-and by memories he couldn’t forget and couldn’t bear to remember.

He walked blindly, following the wind.

Eventually he found a boulder-strewn wadi with a tiny spring that produced less than two cups of water a day. It was enough. He settled to pray, to meditate, to die-if that was what he was called on to do.

He slowed day by day to the unhurried flow of life around him, lost the urgencies of his regimented existence though he kept the rigidity of the framework-it was ground so deeply into him that he would never recognize how unchanging a pattern he laid over his hours.

He rose before dawn, drank three swallows of water, then three more; he walked to the sandy hole he used as a latrine and let his body act as it would. He scrubbed with sand, then washed with meticulous care and half a cup of water, then knelt naked in the morning light, his arms out, his eyes on the rising sun.

When it was directly overhead, he rose from his prayers and meditations, pulled on a coarse robe and sought food for his single meal of the day-a furry bukie or a fat lizard, a kizzai tuber or a tungah root, the fiddle curls from the tender tips of a jiji weed or whatever else came to him. He never knew exactly what he was going to find and that was good. Some days he found nothing and that, too, was good.

His beard grew. And his hair. He combed them with a scratchcone from a tiny, twisted wiba tree, cleaned his teeth with a twig he cut from that tree.

He grew calm at last. Out here the grains of sand blew across the cracks and undulations of the stone without reference to him, out here the web of life let him be.

He was happy.