The Sea is Full of Stars

there are always choices in life. Living or dying, submitting or rebelling, these choices we all make. Well?”

“I—I have nowhere else to go, and I really liked the people I met here so far,” with one exception, she added to herself. “I should like to remain, although it is difficult to imagine being cooped up inside, forbidden to fly.”

“That is a sacrifice you will have to learn to live with until you are initiated into the clan. The reason for this is for you to learn the ways of our clan, our culture, our people, their beliefs and the reasons for them, and to so immerse yourself that you will acquire the faith to believe and the inner knowledge of the spirit. It will not be an easy test, and it can take a short time or a long time depending on you. In the end you must become one with us. You must truly believe as we believe, you must act as we would act, truly place clan above self. The path is not easy and the tests are true tests of all that we value. In the end you alone will prove your worthiness. Now, in the meantime, we will find a place for you to rest, and nourishment if it is needed. Tomorrow we will begin the instruction. Assuming, that is, that you will not leave now.”

She didn’t hesitate, knowing the truth of the priestess’s claims that she would find the same elsewhere. It was beautiful here and the people were nice. If she tried another clan, who was to say that the next priestess might have her sacrificed for violating their territory, particularly since there would be evidence that they weren’t the first choice?

They named her Jaysu, which in context would mean Empty One, or Empty Jar. All Ambora names were flowery because the language was, and depended much on tone and context for meaning. It appeared there were also both sacrificial omens and numerology involved in which name went to whom.

She took well to the monastic life, almost as if it were an echo of something in her unknown past. She did think she might have once been a priestess, but no images came, and she’d already stopped trying to coax anything familiar out.

There were dreams, but they made little sense, and gave off feelings she’d rather not have again.

One feeling she had occasionally, which did not require sleep, was an odd sense of being looked at deep inside her mind; the sensation was indescribable, and it came and went for no apparent reason. The priestesses training her were excited by this rather than distressed; they said it meant she had the rare spirituality to connect to the gods and spirits, and that one day she might resolve these into true communication.

The Ambora saw spirits everywhere. There were spirits for rain, spirits for fire, spirits for volcanoes—and one volcano god over all of them—a spirit in each tree, rock, whatever. The carvings they made in living trees and what they considered living rock represented the greater spirits there, and atop them all the supreme god of the clan, protector of the clan from all other gods. Theirs was a world in which literally everything was not only alive, but, to a series of degrees, had power and thought and used it. There were also, of course, prayers, rituals, sacrifices, mystic signs and symbols, talismans, and the like to protect you from the various spirits—if you had sufficient faith.

Although it was not brought out immediately, the priestesses did know of the wider world and at least neighboring civilizations. They knew about the technology available there, and abhorred it as corrupting and evil, although they were not above trading for a few things they needed, such as bronze ingots of a certain purity and, occasionally, silver and gold. Sometimes others were allowed in, for brief periods, to harvest the enormously rich and bountiful crops that could be grown in Amboran soil, and for which the carnivorous Ambora had little use except as food for their own food. The few vegetable products they consumed were not exactly delicacies: a thick gruel used to relieve constipation, acidic leaves chewed to cure upset stomachs, and so on, and some used in the potions that were in the cauldrons she’d seen when first entering the cave.

One was a mild narcotic that induced a kind of waking trance; it wasn’t debilitating, but you tended to focus single-mindedly on whatever was being taught and happily go along with whoever the teachers were, no matter what they said. Since much of the teaching was by repetition, using chants and prayers and rituals over and over, you tended, with this aid, to learn things quickly, and they stayed with you. In fact, the more she began to accept and think along their lines, the more she felt at home, that she was fitting in with the others.

The belief system and procedure seemed very comfortable, very true to her. They saw the world as ruled by a huge number of gods, each of whom had created a race and land in its own image and now presided over each. There was a chief god who lived not in the heavens but in the center of the planet, called simply the Judge, who watched over all the other gods and their equal places, and by the performance and fidelity of the people living in each would reward or punish. The Judge also decided whether you would simply be extinguished or find eternal punishment when you died, or if you would be sent to a paradise, a world that was all Ambora and where the Amboran people lived in perfect harmony, serving and worshiping the god they could see and hear and know.

There were no ranks in Amboran society. By training and piety and testing you might become one of many levels of priestesses and be absolute in religious authority, while the men constituted civil authority, such as education and a kind of primitive zoning that allowed the forest to thrive even with their density while also managing any building. The women provided food and defense as well as priestesses as needed; the men provided the rest, including sitting on the enormous egg that the women laid, for the week or two until it hatched, which more than anything explained the bow-leggedness of the males and the softness of their feathers.

Defense was necessary, although not day-to-day. Clans not well-managed or subject to volcanic or other natural disasters, usually taken as punishments by the gods, could face starvation or worse. One clan once had a steam vent explode and kill most of the men and children at midday; the only way to reestablish the clan and village was to kidnap some men from other villages. Beyond this, there were always fights of honor or for pride between individuals of different clans who might meet and clash in the air, as well as the constant marking of clan boundaries, which were often disputed by adjacent clans.

Whether her gods and spirits were real or not, the high priestess really did possess powers. Raised and trained to the job, only one priestess would attain her levels and her powers; no other was possible until she died, but that one would come from the ranks of the priestesses around her. There were costs to go with the power, though. The high priestess had to be a lifelong virgin; while there was no requirement that a priestess be celibate, most were as a matter of course, since all wanted to attain the highest spiritual level possible in this life. Most of the priestesses were sterile anyway, thanks to all the drugs and potions they used as a daily part of their lives. The high priestess gained in physical size, and the wings and feathering became incredibly dense, yet once she attained her rank, she could no longer fly.

It was clear that Her Holiness was pleased with Jaysu’s rapid spiritual progress, and that she very much wanted the newcomer to enter the priesthood. It would be a waste for someone so bright to just be another warrior and mother, particularly when the girl definitely could feel the gods talking and at times even the Great Judge below.

She had punished Lema for the lapse in security, although not heavily, but Lema’s last act of penance was to fly to the Great Pit that was the one unifying holy shrine of all clans and Amboran peoples, and there present credentials from the High Priestess and thus fly into the center of the Pit and be transported to South Zone. The act of doing so and also then encountering so many fearsome-looking creatures at close quarters was generally enough to make any warrior believe in miracles and the power of the priesthood, as well as scaring the living crap out of them. Lema had wasted no time seeing the Grand High Priestess who staffed the Amboran embassy in South Zone alone, and sat terrified while this highest of all clerics used exotic magic involving a magic tablet with lots of little dots on it and magic screens, and ultimately printed out a packet of information that was then placed in a pouch, sealed, and given to Lema for the return trip. There was no danger of Lema reading this, since only priestesses and male educators were literate, or needed to be.

When the High Priestess got the papers, she was more shocked than surprised by the data. She well understood the process of conditioning and programming of the mind—that was part of the job here—but this! This was as pure evil as she’d seen in a long time. Slavery was an abhorrent concept to her, and, even worse, slavery done by someone just for ego and sadistic pleasures and for no true need—horrible. The photos of the entries wouldn’t and didn’t correlate to present appearance, but faces always told something, and those two were blanks. They’d had all the humanity just squeezed out of them. Had she not seen Jaysu, she would have said flatly that the evil one had left their bodies alive but murdered their souls. It was little wonder that the woman had lost her memory; it would have been intolerable to remember that period, the High Priestess suspected.