Steal Across the Sky Read Free Page A

Ilni and Omoro, and looked away.
Which of you betrayed the university, betrayed the city, betrayed my son?
    Aveo and the
cul
halted before the throne, sank to their knees, and crossed their arms over their breasts. The soldiers, who were not people but only utensils, remained standing. They had no souls and thus were incapable, like animals or plants, of meaningful homage to the Goddess of All Green and Her son, Uldunu. Aveo gazed at the king’s toenails, painted with tiny green swirls and encased in green sandals set with gold.
    “Up,” Uldunu said.
    Aveo rose.
    “Raise eyes. You are a traitor, Aveo ol Imbro.”
    It was not permitted to speak, since Aveo had not been asked a question. It was permitted, now, to gaze, and he and the king studied each other. Aveo saw a young man fantastically painted, every inch of his bare-chested body in intricate green designs, petals inside petals, sensuous curving vines and lashing textured branches, a strong and brutal body turned into a support for the living world. The king’s short skirt was green spider-silk. His eyes were bluer than those of the father he had murdered.
    What did Uldunu see? A coarse brown skirt instead of the red Aveo had once worn, no caste paint, a man neither young nor old but infinitely more aged than before grief had broken him.
    “You are a traitor,” Uldunu repeated. “You advised my father, and your son led a pathetic uprising against me. You deserve to die as he did, and in the same agony. You deserve that your soul, like his, should lie forever fallow, never blooming in Her sight. But the Goddess of All Green has another task for you.”
    Aveo failed to keep surprise from his face.
    “You were a scholar,” the king said, his voice full of contempt for such a pursuit. He waved his hand at the advisors behind him. “These men tell me you studied the languages and customs and false gods of those cities that are our enemies. You have lived among them.”
    They had not been enemies then
. Nor had their gods proven any more or less false than the Goddess of All Green. But a man like the king could never understand how Aveo had come to believe that, nor the emptiness that lack of belief left him with now.
Ojea
. . .
    “You will use this traitorous knowledge now for the glory of the Goddess. In Memenat a woman has hatched from an egg fallen out of the sky. She cannot be killed by spears or fire, so perhaps she is an evil goddess from an enemy city. But she cannot kill those who attack her, so perhaps she is not a goddess. You will go there and talk to her in your enemy languages and find out why she is here.”
    Aveo blinked. Accustomed as he was to the stupid and blood-hungry childishness of the king, and to the endless foolish talk about religion and goddesses, this was something new. A woman from an egg, a egg from the sky . . . He had heard no rumors that Uldunu Four was mad.
    “You will also discover how we can kill her. If you fail to discover that, you will die a far worse death than your traitor son. Go.”
    The
cul
pushed Aveo, not hard, and he fell to his knees. The green-and-gold sandals below thick legs moved away. When he had gone, Aveo rose, a little dazed.
    Evidently Uldunu Four not only held the power of life and death, he could also change the essential nature of the real. Aveo had been a traitor and a condemned man but no longer a scholar. Now he was still atraitor, no longer a condemned man, and restored to being a scholar. Also, apparently, something else: an emissary to a woman hatched from an egg fallen out of the sky.
     
    JUST BEFORE THE ASSASSINATION OF ULDUNU Three, Aveo had composed a treatise on the relationship of reality to kulith, the game played ubiquitously in the city by everyone from advisors to slaves. How much of what we believe, this treatise asked, is shaped by the objects in common use around us? Would we have numbers in tens if we did not have ten fingers and toes? Would we try less hard to outwit each other