Nils and Pirva were with him, as were half a dozen other Gharm, early the following morning when he stuck a staff into the most level patch they could find, tied a rope to it, and scribed the two circles upon which the temple would be built. He made them small. There would not be enough help, he felt, to build it large, but that didn’t matter. Small was more appropriate for the Gharm.
He dug the foundations himself. He had watched several other temples being built besides the one he had worked on in his own settlement, so he knew how to set about it. The stones of Voorstod were a different color from the stones of Hobbs Land, but since they were ledge stones which broke into flat slabs and cracked across into straight pieces, they were easy to lay. Jep saw no reason to scoop out the floor. A flat floor would be more suitable for the Gharm, as it was for humankind. He merely flattened the soil and rammed it hard before putting down a single layer of large, flat stones as a base for mosaics. He had seen no small, smooth, colored stones in the streams of the kind ubiquitous in Hobbs Land. He did not know what could be found for the mosaics, but that matter would wait until later.
The Gharm came to help, sometimes one or two, sometimes a dozen from the town, often at night, after their work was done and the Voorstoders down in Sarby had drunk themselves into sodden slumber. Actually, they came to hear what Jep had to say, which was that he, Jep, was the One Who had come to tell them that the Gods—that is, the Tchenka—would soon come here to Voorstod, and that this was to be their first house.
“You are to lay their pictures on the floor,” he said. “In my home, we laid our own Tchenka, in rock and clay. I do not know your Tchenka, so you must do it.”
This amazed the Gharm. However, a member of the Grass-serpent clan found some green stone on the hill, bashed it into small pieces and laid a fringed green snake with a red eye, the whole set in a bed of clay which dried hard only after they built a fire on top of it and then polished the hardened result with fine sand. Grass snake was followed by a birdlike creature with great round eyes, laid in pebbles of brown and tan and white, and then by a dozen kinds of air, water, and land dwellers, some recog nizable to Jep’s eyes and more not. Some of the mosaic was laid in broken tile and some was laid in broken glass and some was put together out of odds and ends of equipment, whole or in pieces. Still, each morning when he looked at the floor, something new had been laid into the clay during the night, burned hard, and polished. Each night when he fell into bed, something new had been done to the temple. The work moved with astonishing rapidity. The walls and arches seemed to leap into being, smaller and more delicate ones than those he had known in the settlements. In forty or fifty days, designs covered the entire floor, swirling and knotting, giving a different feeling than those in the temples on Hobbs Land. Less peaceful, they were. More pleading. The roof was different, as well. The Gharm had made the roof as they made their huts, out of reed bundles hung upon stringers, rejecting a clay layer for, as they told Jep, it would never dry.
There were no grills for the ringwall. Jep explained how grills were used in his own land, and the Gharm responded with panels of marvelously woven and ornamented cane.
“When will the Tchenka come,” they asked him when all had been done that they could do.
“When the other One Who comes for me,” he said. “It is she who brings the substance of creation.”
“Jep is He-Is-Accomplished,” they nodded to one another when he said this. “She who comes is She-Goes-On-Creating. Perhaps he tells us the truth.”
They considered this solemnly, without rejoicing. There was no great joy among the Gharm. When Jep urged them, they sang their whispery songs very quietly, so the Voorstoders would not hear: the endless catalog of their Tchenka, songs which had been taught to every Gharm child—though softly, softly, lest the Voorstoders grow angry and defile the songs with blood. In addition to the catalog, there were individual songs, which told of the lives of the Tchenka after they had been created. Outside these theological matters, the Gharm spoke little and complained not at all. When they did speak, most of their talk was of the lottery, which chose those to escape next, those to go out into the world through Skelp and Wander and Green Hurrah into Ahabar, where their kinsmen waited with clothing and food and friends and schooling for some of every clan, some of every blood line, so the people might not die.
When the temple was finished, it turned out to be suitable for living, also, a place in which a number of Gharm might dwell, better ventilated and drier than their huts.
“Will it be sacrilege?” they asked Jep. “Is it evil to dwell in the God’s house.”
“It’s a good thing,” Jep advised them. “To keep the God’s house warm and dry until the God itself arrives. Then you should build houses of your own. Thereafter he watched, bemused, while they built little houses for themselves which were surprisingly similar to those built upon Hobbs Land by the Departed.
When the temple was finished, he lay upon his bed wondering what he would do with himself now. There were over a hundred scratches on the plaster beside the fireplace. If something didn’t happen soon, so he
