'Also, in certain caves, water drips down.'
Twelve days later they reached another holy place, the site of a crumbling temple called zhastoynaya. Tess and Bakhtiian reached it first.
'It's beautiful,' said Tess.
The temple lay at the base of an escarpment. The cliffs had crumbled away here and there to obliterate much of the back half of the ruins. Behind them lay a river, shallow, sluggish, and muddy, which they had forded to reach the temple grounds. The water somehow signaled the limit of the plain, separating that mortal place from this retreat of the gods, which seemed greener, richer, quieter than the lands humans haunted. A spring bubbled from the ground in the center of the ruins and coursed down, a fluid line shot through with sunlight, to stream silver into the river and then, a meter out, mingle and lose itself in the brown waters.
They let the horses stand and wandered up through the temple. In this land where a tent was the largest shelter, the ruins-no more than three fallen buildings-seemed enormous. Most of the central columns still stood like two lines of soldiers at attention, fluted, wider at the base and top and chipped all along their length, worn away by the wind and the rain. There was no roof. Two buildings flanked the first, one a low line of stone, the other an outline of waist-high walls and stone lintels without doors.
Bakhtiian led her up to the spring and knelt beside it. The water gushed up from an invisible source, filled a stone basin to the rim, and sluiced down between parallel columns half in and half out of a stone trough that had been sunk into the ground to guide it down to the river.
'It is said that a person who drinks from this spring will gain courage and wit and the respect of those worth being respected by.' He looked up at her. 'Will you drink?'
She gazed at the spring: clear water, without a doubt cold and satisfying. 'Who says that?'
'It is an old legend, left here by the gods.'
'Then I will drink.'
'Drink your fill.'
The water was so cold it made her gasp; it took only a little to satisfy her. 'Don't you drink, Bakhtiian?'
'Drinking once gives you the favor of the gods. Drinking twice… only a greedy man drinks twice.'
They wandered down the avenue of columns and, at Tess's insistence, explored a bit more. He drew the line at climbing the cliff, so Tess climbed one of the taller walls-chest-height-and sat on it, letting her heels drum the stone as she gazed out beyond the river, watching for the arrival of the jahar. Bakhtiian leaned against the wall beside her. He took out his knife and his hands played with it absently as he, too, studied the distant swell of golden plain. A wind bent the grass tips down, sending fluid patterns of light across the land. Tess would have known this place was a temple even without being told. The touch of the gods lay on it, deep, heavy, eternal. A few birds whistled above. Insects droned dreamlike in the grass. The sun beat warmly on her face, and she sighed and closed her eyes.
And thought of the Chapalii.
'Does this temple belong to one of your gods?' she asked.
The knife lay still in his hands. 'The jaran have no temples. Our gods are as restless as we are, although there is One you can petition in the dark, in the night, if you are in desperate need. But the gods have touched this place, so we honor it.'
'You don't know who it was built for? Who built it?'
'Does it matter? Winds blow from all directions.'
'What if it's important what direction it blows from?'
The corners of his lips twitched up. 'Ah, yes. Will it be a cold wind or a warm one? Fierce or gentle?' He lapsed into Rhuian. 'One that will guide a ship into port or break it on the rocks? That, of course, would be a Jedan analogy.
No. I don't know who built this place. Perhaps the khepelli do.'
'That's what I'm afraid of,' Tess muttered under her breath. But this place was so old, ruined-and the transmitting station was functional. She could not link the two.
'I beg your pardon?'
'I just-I would have thought that the jaran would be more-more jealous of their own gods.'
He considered this a moment. 'But they aren't jealous of us. When I was in Jeds, I read of a land across the seas where they worship five underground pools and think their Lady resides within. At the zhapolaya, the khepelli worshiped the stone as if their god lived there. And you spoke of a people who abstain from pleasure and fill themselves instead with their god's passion. They are all gods. That they are different, and so many, does not lessen them. I would never presume to say that my particular gods are worthy of a temple, and not any others.'
The wind moved in her hair. 'And yet you killed a man for your gods. Are other gods as worthy?'
'I remember. But I have learned that the world is a delicate thing, and the gods-all gods-are as one with it, are the keepers of that balance. And since the world is within me as well as outside of me, if the balance is disturbed and not righted then I am also left in discord, and if I do nothing to correct this imbalance, then we, the world and I, shall never return to harmony. And if this is true for me alone, how much more true it is for an entire people.'
'But Yuri said that-' she hesitated- 'that you gave him a merciful death, compared to what-what he was meant to receive.'
Bakhtiian looked away from her, his expression shuttered. 'I am not a savage,' he said almost inaudibly.
Tess fell silent. The wind brought to her a sharp, rich fragrance, like vanilla. 'It's true,' she said finally, 'that the world forces us to make bitter choices. I suppose that makes it hard to search for the truth, especially if we believe that truth can only be found along the path that is familiar to us.'
He tossed his knife up. It caught the sunlight and flashed. For that instant, as he watched the knife reach its peak and begin to fall again, his face opened somehow, giving her a glimpse of the boy, twenty years ago, who had played with such dangerous toys with the same unself-conscious joy and absorption with which a child plays with building blocks. Then the knife fell, and he caught it.
'God, isn't that dangerous?'
He laughed. 'Of course.' He sheathed the knife. 'How can any one of us claim to know which paths the gods walk? How can we hope to walk on their path at all? Except for philosophers like Newton, of course.'
'Newton walked many strange paths. I have to suppose that all paths have gods of one kind or another. But I think we are responsible for finding our own way.'
'We must do what we can with what we have?'
Tess pushed herself to the edge of the wall and jumped down. Bakhtiian put out a hand to steady her landing, a momentary touch, no more. 'Is that what you believe?'
'What I believe?' Leaning back against the wall, he folded his arms over his belt. Wind caught a strand of his hair and blew it up away from his forehead. 'I don't know where the sun and the moon came from, how the grass and the hills came to be. I suppose they came by themselves. But I believe that there is truth to be found, and I'm not always certain that it is only to be found in the gods. Or in what we call the gods.'
'You've been reading too much philosophy.'
He smiled. 'Is philosophy dangerous?'
'Very dangerous.'
'What do you believe, then?'
'I believe that there is truth to be found inside every person, but that very few people find it because it is dark inside, and deeply hidden, and the trees grow thickly.'
'But you forget, there are always springs one can drink from.' He looked toward the plains. 'Ah, there are our fellow mortals.'
'Come to bask in the fragrance of immortality, however fleeting?'
'Bask in the fragrance? I think you mean bask in the warmth.'
