Lutha held out her hands, empty, the universal gesture of peace.
“We have come to save the lives of the Dinadhi,” she said. “There is a threat from outside the planet.”
They began shouting fervently at one another. I gathered that one faction wanted to kill us immediately, while another, slightly larger faction was reminded that blood could not be shed near the sacred precincts without the gravest consequences. These antiphonal shouts went on for some time—during which Lutha muttered fragmentary translations—before the shouters reached a solution that all could agree to. They would pen us up during the ceremony, which was about to begin. After Tahs-uppi, they would take us somewhere else and kill us. Not one of them had paid attention to the threat Lutha had told them of. Either they didn’t believe her or they didn’t care. They were frightening in their single-mindedness.
I went to Lutha’s side.
“Are these your spirit people?” she asked me.
“I don’t know,” I whispered. “Nobody ever told me they were … like this. Why are they like this?”
My words drew the attention of one of them, who darted forward, twitched my veil to one side, then screamed as he turned and fled. The others chattered among themselves, backing slowly away. Lutha took hold of the left-lead gaufer’s halter and tugged him forward. The other gaufers leaned into the harness, and the wain creaked after. Trompe and Leelson dropped back to walk beside it.
“I am unclean,” I told her as we slowly pursued the spirit people, who were limping and stumbling away from us as fast as they could go. “He says the beautiful people have rejected me, and now that he has touched me, he must go out of the valley and cut his hand off at once.”
“You sound quite calm about it. Do you think he means to do it?” she asked.
“I don’t care if he does,” I said angrily. “They’re all men, Lutha. They’re eaten worse than I, but they’re not unclean! What right have they!”
The fleeing bunch split before us, creating an open aisle that led toward a stout pen set upon a small rounded hill.
“Gaufer pen,” I said, sidetracked from my annoyance. “They’re always set high like that, so they drain well and don’t cause a muck.”
Whether intended for gaufers or not, the pen was now to be used for us. There were already a dozen spirit people arrayed outside the fence, muttering angrily to one another over the bulk of several large and shiny weapons.
“I hope those fusion rifles are not charged,” Leelson said to the air.
One particularly clumsy guard (not his fault; he had no fingers on his right hand) chose that moment to drop his weapon.
Lutha said, “I’ve had arms dealers as clients, and I’ve seen diagrams of that weapon. It looks to me like an Asenagi product, but he had it set on standby. If it had been set in firing position, this whole place would be gone by now.”
Leelson paled. Trompe gulped, “We are probably the first outsiders they’ve ever seen. They’ve obtained weapons for protection against intruders, but they have no idea how to use them.”
The idea of novices with deadly weapons was not cheering, and the others turned their eyes elsewhere, not to seem threatening.
“Let’s not bother them with talk,” Lutha suggested. “If that’s really the Great Flag of the Alliance coming down the hill, let the envoy or whoever deal with the problem.”
Our willingness to be penned up seemed to have quieted some of the panicky gestures and voices around us. The clumsy guards backed off a little, allowing us to concentrate on the view of the omphalos our low hill afforded.
The temple was now surrounded by several nearly complete concentric circles of kneeling men, some spirit people, and some songfathers, distinguishable by the colors of their robes, black for spirit people, hide brown for the others. Each had his own cushion, and each knelt at an equal distance from his fellows. The circles were neat and perfectly regular, and as new men arrived they filled in the gaps and started new circles concentric to the old ones. I saw no women anywhere near the temple.
Lutha laid her hand on my arm and jerked her head toward the eastern cliffs. There were other black-clad forms huddled at the base of the buildings and in the windows. She borrowed the glasses from Trompe and gave them a good looking over before passing the glasses to me. They were the female spirit people, all of them disfigured or maimed and as thin as the men.
Lutha said, “They’re too thin for childbearing. Starving women don’t get pregnant. They don’t even menstruate.”
“But this valley is fertile!” I told her. “The soil is wonderful. And they have a river! They should have lots of food! More than we can raise in the canyons!” Perhaps it was significant that we had seen no sign of cultivation anywhere in the valley. The grass was of a different sort than I knew. Perhaps it too was sacred and farming was forbidden.
“Look at the temple,” urged Leelson. “At the floor!”
The temple was in the form of a circular dais made up of three concentric steps. The first was below the pillars. The second formed the base for the circle of pillars that supported the roof. The third was inside the pillars and made up the floor of the temple itself. The south half, a semicircle of this inner circle, was one step higher yet, with massive metal links protruding at both the east and west ends of the low step. A long and heavy rope
