Inhei’s mother taught him much more in the months that followed. Whenever they went on an errand in the city, she found time to show him a new mark she had discovered, smeared on an alleyway wall or hidden in the shadows beneath a footbridge. Each new glimmer of colour was a shout of defiance against the wardens, and Inhei’s heart swelled with delight every time he saw one.
His mother told him more about her childhood in the valleys, and the simple rituals and wordless devotions her own mother had taught her. They were not prayers so much as moments of reflection, opening oneself for guidance. “Make your mind quiet, away from the temple’s noise, and you will hear them,” she promised him.
He tried, every day. He listened for the gods in every silence, straining to hear a voice, a call, the sound of wings. He heard nothing. He swore to himself that he would keep trying.
He didn’t tell his older brother, in the end. His mother did not forbid him, but there was an understanding between them that two minds knowing the secret was risky enough. One day, he thought, I’ll find a way to tell them all.
The summer wore on, cooling into autumn. Inhei’s tenth birthday came and went, and he began to earn some coins running errands for the shopkeepers on the Pedlars’ Bridge. He was a fast runner and he had a sharp memory, which made him an excellent messenger-boy. One of the coopers was so impressed with Inhei’s quickness that he said he might one day make an apprentice of him.
Inhei’s father was delighted to come home to that news. “Better a real trade for you than the scaffolds,” he said, clapping Inhei warmly on the shoulder. “You can spend your days in a nice cosy workshop, rather than up on the temple roof where the wind cuts like ice.”
“Barrel-making is still hard work, love,” Inhei’s mother remarked from the kitchen, where she was kneading dough, her hands speckled white with flour. He could tell she was pleased as well.
“No barrel-maker ever fell two hundred feet off the top of his barrel,” Inhei’s father replied. “As far as I’ve heard, anyway.”
Inhei did not neglect his duties to the temple, of course. He knew not to let appearances slip in front of the neighbours, especially nosy ones like old Chehga. He still bowed when the wardens went past with their iron-studded cudgels. He learned his prayers by heart and was never late making his offerings. In the temple courtyard, he sat and listened along with all the others to long sermons railing against idolatry and warning of the dangers of an unguarded mind.
“When we stray from the path of the gods, even for a moment, we open the door to evil,” a tall, scruffily-bearded young priest told them one chilly morning. His voice echoed over the bowed heads of a thousand prayer-sashed boys. “To ruin and corruption. Do not forget, boys, this city was built by the temple. Before the temple, we were wretched things, mere savages, ignorant and accursed. Without the temple, we would be savages once more. Shall it be so? Shall we give in to wickedness?”
“No!” the boys roared in unison. Inhei joined in with as much false enthusiasm as he could muster, mindful of his brother and the neighbour boys sitting around him. All the way through the following prayers, he stared up at the massive dome of the temple. Its golden gleam was almost blinding in the morning sun. He wondered how it would look daubed in a thousand different colours.
*
Late in the year, as Kursalian was preparing for the first of the three winter festivals, Inhei and his mother went along the riverside to buy fresh fish near the city’s western wall. As usual, Inhei kept his eyes on the alleymouths they passed, looking for any new god-marks. They seemed to show up wherever he went. He was delighted to think that there were so many who honoured the alley gods in secret. He glanced at the faces of the people in the street, wondering which of them knew the same truth that he knew.
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They had nearly reached the fishmonger when a cacophony of yells and thuds echoed through the streets. Inhei was snapped out of his daydreams. It was rare to hear such disorder in the city, especially so close to the festival-month. He and his mother exchanged a look of wary curiosity.
They followed the sounds of commotion through the narrow riverside alleys, to where a small crowd had gathered among the meagre shacks and lean-tos that sheltered in the shadow of the city walls. This was one of the poorest parts of Kursalian, and Inhei had seldom been anywhere near it. Everyone said it was a hive of drunks and cutpurses. The wardens raided it from time to time, to cart off a gang of thieves or a particularly vicious bandit.
And indeed, the crowd had come to watch a full patrol of wardens at work. They were bashing one of the shacks apart with their cudgels. But the men they were dragging from its ruins were not thieves.
They were Foresters, the big copper-skinned nomad folk from the eastern steppe. Their clans often came to Kursalian to trade, and a handful of them had settled in the slums, finding work as petty labourers. Inhei had seen them rowing barges on the water and carrying palanquins for the wealthy. They kept to themselves, speaking their own rough tongue, and normally the wardens let them be.
But these ones had blasphemed, Inhei learned. They had built a shrine to their pagan ancestor spirits, within the walls of Kursalian. An audacious act of defiance against the temple. They had hidden it well inside their shack, but not so well that a neighbour hadn’t spotted them.
Inhei knew what would happen now. He had heard of such raids many times, but never seen one firsthand before. Those men would be given a choice. Bondage to the temple as menials, perhaps for the rest of their lives, or a swift beheading on the temple steps.
Most of the Foresters went quietly, heads bowed. One struggled and kicked, cursing the wardens in broken Quhrai. He was a powerfully-built man, and it took four of them to subdue him, battering him with their fists and cudgels until he went to his knees. The watching crowd jeered and spat at him. He was still weakly thrashing when they dragged him away. That one, Inhei was sure, would lose his head rather than renounce his gods.
When the wardens and their prisoners were gone, Inhei stood staring at the wreckage of the little shack. The flimsy wooden walls had been smashed in and the roof pulled down, everything within – everything that had been sacred to those Foresters – stomped to pieces in the muddy ground. He turned to his mother in helpless, bewildered rage.
“Why do the gods – our gods – not stop them?” he demanded, in a furious whisper. It was all he could do to keep his voice down, knowing that whoever had informed on the Foresters’ shrine could still be skulking about. “Why do they let the wardens do this? Why don’t they bring an end to it?”
“Because that is not what they are here for, love. They teach us to endure,” she told him. Her voice shook, her words freighted with sadness. “They teach us that all sorrow will pass, in time. The wardens cannot change that. One day, even the temple will be gone, but the gods will endure, and so will we.”
They cut short their journey to the fishmonger and went home in silence. Inhei’s heart raced with wild anger and fear every time they passed a wardens’ tower. When he got home, his older brother frowned at his wretched expression and asked him what was wrong. Inhei had no answer for him.
That night, he dreamed that the winged shapes of the alley gods circled high over the city, blown on the mountain winds. No matter how much he called to them, they would not answer him. They rose higher and higher, tatters of colour in the empty sky, until they were out of sight.
*
When Inhei was eleven, the wardens came for his mother.
They came one moonless, windless night, in a flurry of shouts and smashing glass and flickering torchlight. They pulled Inhei’s mother from her bed. They beat Inhei’s father and older brother with their cudgels when they tried to stop them taking her. They threw a shroud of thick black cloth over her head and dragged her from the house with her bare feet scrabbling in the splinters of the kicked-in door. Inhei huddled with his younger siblings in the corner of the front room, too afraid even to cry, and watched her struggling shape grow smaller and smaller down the street, suspended by the arms between two hooded wardens.
Inhei’s father got up and hobbled after them. “Mera,” he called, his voice thickened by the blood in his mouth. “Mera, Mera, Mera-”
One of the trailing wardens turned and struck him a swift backhanded blow that silenced him and sent him to his knees on the cobbles. The wardens took Inhei’s mother across the Pedlars’ Bridge, their torches making tall shadows dance on the shuttered shopfronts. Then they passed through the tollgate on the far side, and the darkness swallowed them.
When it was quiet, Inhei and his bloodied older brother went out into the street. As they helped their hoarsely weeping father upright, Inhei saw old Chehga leaning on her doorframe, a guttering oil lamp in her bony hand. She was smiling.
And in that instant, in a rush of rage and horror and hatred, Inhei knew.