The Last Priestess
By Terry L. White

 To the women of the guild who reminded me of the magic ....

  PROLOGUE The Bride of the Condor

 Crs'tal looked up at the heavens. Far away, in the distance, she could see the last fading light of the great bird_like vehicle that carried her lover Jared away.

Crs'tal could not imagine how far a light would have to travel before it could not be seen by the naked eye, but she did know each moment that passed carried her beloved Jared and his ship further and further from the plain on which she stood.

 Months before there had been a disturbance in the heavens and Jared's great sky ship had landed on the plain, casting The People into confusion, causing them to run from place to place in terror and to make endless bloody sacrifices to the ugly gods they worshiped.

 The People were squat and dark, with hooked noses like the beaks of hawks. They had short sturdy limbs that allowed them to walk long distances over the rugged terrain of the plain and nearby mountains.

 Their visitors had long, graceful limbs, fair skins, and hair the color of the sun.

 The People carried on the activities of their daily lives with implements of soft, beaten copper and stone.

 The visitors from the sky carried knives of hardened metal and weapons that belched fire and light. Those weapons brought death with voices as loud as thunder.

 The People had watched from their hiding places as the fair visitors walked the streets of their village and examined their dwellings. It did not pass unnoticed that the visitors did no harm in their explorations. Satisfied the sky_born intruders were none of their own kind, The People came to the conclusion the entities who fell from the sky were Gods and thus, their priests and wise men made the decision to worship them with sacrifices of children and the deflowering of virgins.

 The sky men turned away in horror.

 Crs'tal had been one of the young women marked for sacrifice in honor of the visitors, but the Chief of the Sky Gods, Jared, had stopped her execution with a shout of outrage, and taken her hand to lead her from the bloody altar while The People watched with open mouths.

 Jared had taken one look at the world in which Crs'tal lived and fallen into a spell, charmed by the woman's mysterious eyes and her beautiful surroundings.

 Certainly the world of The People was beautiful, with its mysterious, brooding plains and the towering, Andes, the mountains whose saw_toothed peaks were often shrouded in dreamlike mists.

 Yet something in this place felt like home to the man Jared, who had spent his life in travel from galaxy to galaxy looking for intelligent life on other worlds.

 But Jared had been appalled at the casual way the priests and wise men of The People regarded life. He recognized the bloodthirsty attitude of The People as that of a race only recently ascended from the animal kingdom.

 Like children, the dark citizens of the plain stood in ignorance, in desperate need of instruction. As his men watched to see no harm came to their leader, Jared set about making a set of laws for the innocent and savage people of "Earth," the name he had given the world he had found.

 When those laws were complete, Jared set about teaching them to the holy men and women who tended the many gods and goddesses of the place.

 Crs'tal, drawn by love and gratitude to the man_god who saved her life, soon become a voluntary slave to Jared, making him comfortable in the manner of her people, feeding him the best foods she could coax from the housewives of the clan and prepared with her slender hands, clothing his nakedness with fine textiles woven by the nimble fingers of temple women who usually toiled for kings alone. In time she came to his bed.

 In return for her love Jared created a post of importance for Crs'tal _ as chief acolyte to the Mother Goddess, the Moon. Jared had decreed the women who served that office be called "The Mamacuna. The Mother's Chosen." No man of The People, priest or commoner, was to so much as lay a finger on the women who served the silver statue of the Goddess Jared ordered cast in Crs'tal's image and honor. He did, however, rule that if a woman of the Temple of the Goddess desired to take a lover, she could do so with no aspersions to be cast on her person or office.

 And so, Crs'tal was safe, if _ in her newly sacred role _ lonelier than she had ever been in her life.

 Crs'tal had known much tenderness at the hands of Jared and so she was saddened beyond telling when he told her he had to go back to his own world. "But I will not stay for long," Jared stood behind her, his arms wrapped across her chest, her head drawn back to touch his chin while his fine blue eyes roved the distant heavens. "I will come back. I could not live without you."

 Crs'tal did not doubt Jared's words. Did he not speak in her own tongue? Who but a God could have fallen from the sky to save her from the knives of the priests would later whisper words of love while the night beings sang outside their window?

 How she resented the hours Jared spent with the priests.

 And that was even before she knew Jared meant to return to his home in the Milky Way: the sky formation known to The People as the Road to Infinity, the pathway to the Otherworld for the dead.

 Once, near the end of Jared's stay on Earth, trying to help Crs'tal picture how far away his world, Deesa, was from her own; he had walked with her on the plain. The night had been clear, unmarred by mist or cloud, and the Pleiades, the sister stars that foretold times of famine of plenty for The People had shone clearly upon their faces.

 "Out there," Jared pointed to a mass of tiny lights along the outer edge of the star_mass. "Is a world nearly as beautiful as this..." He sighed like a lover who misses his mate.

 "You wish to return to Deesa so soon? Are you so sad here?" Crs'tal asked.

 "My wife died before I began this journey," Jared shook his head. "I loved her very much."

 Crs'tal had looked away in pain. She loved Jared, but although he treated her tenderly, Jared did not seem like a man in love. She sometimes wondered if she had left some lover's thing undone to have him treat her like a pet cony.

 "Your moon is so beautiful," Jared said, interrupting Crs'tal's reverie. He'd told her world had three moons, but none so large and silvery as the single moon of this beautiful world.

 "The Moon is the Mother of life," Crs'tal reminded him with a whisper. She turned away so he could not see the tears on her cheeks.

 "I shall remember," Jared said gently and turned the small dark maiden to face him. "As I shall remember you, Crs'tal. In a strange way we belong to one another. You saved my life and I have saved yours. I thought I could never love again."

 "Love?" Crs'tal whispered. "You said your love was dead."

 "I love you, Crs'tal," Jared turned her to him, and tipped back her head to claim her lips. "I love you more than I have ever loved anything in my life."

 And so, they pledged themselves in the light of Mother Moon and a child was conceived of their mating there on the windswept plain.

 But Jared had to leave her before Crs'tal had been sure his seed had taken root in her belly. His sky boat became no more than a pinpoint of light in the heavens, a light she watched nightly, until it was no more.

 Only the yellow tracks of his ship remained, the gray skin of the plain torn away by forces The People could not understand or explain.

 CHAPTER ONE

 Qwana peered across the plain and felt a pang of sorrow. This was her last day of freedom. Far away across the misty span of earth, a pair of dark figures toiled, cutting away the grayish earth, leaving a broad, pinkish_yellow line that wound in a spiral toward a central point on the Nazca plain.

 The air was very clear and from where she stood, Qwana could hear the chants of the workers as they toiled to discharge their religious obligation to the Sun. They sang to the Sun and to acacila, the Spirits of the Winds. The worker's songs, although faint because they were so far away, reminded her of her duty to the Goddess. When this day ended, she would no longer be free to walk the plains and watch the condors and ravens wheel overhead as they searched for mice and cavas, the small pig_like rodents that burrowed beneath the stones of the plain.

 Never again would she be allowed to walk to the foothills of the mighty Andes to the spring for fresh water to quench her thirst. No more would she grind meal and shape it into little cakes to bake at the side of a comfortable fire. No more would she tend and harvest her Sister, Corn. All things physical would be done for her, and more, for she was to be one of the chosen, the Mamacuna. This very day she would take her place as an aella, a sacred virgin in the Temple of the Moon to serve The Mother Goddess.

 She had no choice in the matter. Her path had been planned since before she was born.

 Qwana threw herself on the ground and wept a little for the life she was about to leave.

 Which was no more like the lives of the other young women in Loa than night was like day. Qwana had always been different. The circumstances of her birth had marked her in secret ways, leaving her apart and lonely during the growing_up time when girls played at being mothers and worked with the older women of the community learning women's ways.

 If only her father had not had his heart set on a male child, everything might have been so different.

 By all accounts Qwana had been born in the ordinary way, with the holy women chanting prayers as her mother, Maya, squatted upon a sweet grass mat and leaned on the arms of her elder sister, Nana, for support. Her face shone with scented oil and perspiration as she labored to bring forth her child.

 "You must work harder, Sister," Nana urged when Maya's strength faltered. "Toxli awaits his son."

 Maya's bronze fingers gripped her sister's arm so the flesh stood out white. She breathed the holy sisters' bitter incense. "Toxli can wait," she panted and gave herself to the pain. She bore down hard, then relaxed as the spasm passed. "If I had seen the end of it when he put this child's spirit within me with his honeyed tongue and silken fingers, I would have cut his throat and given his blood as a sacrifice to the Gods of Darkness.... Aeii!" Her groan of anguish signaled a new and more violent stage of her labor.

 Two women, tempered by age and wisdom, the Mamacuna chanted their magic and sang soft songs of encouragement. Among their duties as priestesses to the Mother, was attending the labor of high_born ladies.

 The four women worked for what seemed like hours, then, after the terrible struggle all souls must endure when they chose to enter the world of mankind, Qwana was born.

 She lay, glistening with birth fluids on the mat between her mother's feet, a tiny scrap of humanity, waiting for a purpose for which to live. Unlike some newborns, who screeched their protests at being deprived of their warm harbor, Maya's child seemed to gaze calmly at the women gathered to honor her entrance into their world. A small smile of what may have been amusement formed on her tiny lips.

 "It is only a girl," Maya whimpered at last and rose on trembling limbs to be cleansed. "She is marked," she pointed with a sigh to a large red crescent birthmark that defaced the child's perfect features. The mark was not only large, but placed as it was at the site of the third eye in the middle of the baby's forehead, it gave Maya even more cause to be disappointed. Not only was her child not perfect, it was also not a son. She felt beaten, defeated. A son she had promised Toxli, and this thing, this miserable, marked girl child had been given. If she had been stronger, she would have taken her to the plain herself and left her there to feed the ravens.

 Maya was weak from her ordeal, her legs trembled. She turned away and did not reach for the child as a new mother should. Instead, she lay down upon the clean mat of sweet grass her midwives spread for her and allowed a soft sling of woven grasses lined with cotton fibers to be secured between her legs to catch the remainder of the birth fluids. And then, with a sigh that seemed to call up all the sadness and hurt in the universe, Maya turned her face to the wall. "Go away," she commanded. "Leave me alone so I can die."

 Nana could not understand her sister's attitude. "You will not die, and you should be happy, Sister, this child is beautiful." Her sister tried to interest Maya in the new daughter of The People. "Toxli will make do with a daughter easily enough, and the birthmark will hardly show when the little one has her ceremonial markings." she said firmly, then took the beautifully formed girl child up in her hands. "This One has the eyes of a jaguar," she said with satisfaction as she handed the baby to the old priestesses for their examination, which would be done before the child would be cleansed of the cheesy substance that clung to her tiny limbs and features.

 When the old women muttered their blessings over the new life, Nana, whose forehead, cheekbones, and earlobes were tattooed with ancient patterns that bespoke her rank and womanhood, took up the child, cleansed her with scented oil and wrapped her in a clean cloth worked in a pattern of moon and stars. The infant remained placid, although her aunt's hands were rough and hard from hours at the loom and her grinding stone.

 "Give her to me again," A'ruz the elder of the priestesses, held out hands as gnarled as the thorn bushes of the plain. She watched impatiently as the child was swaddled. Her sister_priestess, Mix'la took up a chant, fanning clouds of bitter smoke up from her pot of burning herbs to cleanse every corner of the dwelling. The sound of her song rose and fell as the older woman examined the newcomer for the second time.

 "This One is a child of the Spirit People," she announced after a long study of the infant. "She bears the mark of The Mother." Her tone was grave, touched with awe. There had been signs and portents that a female child would come to The People, and that this particular child would be different, would be marked in a particular way, and have an important destiny.

 A comet had flown only the night before, and A'ruz had watched its fiery course across the night sky and known the child of fate would soon enter the earth plane. When Nana had asked the priestesses to attend the birth of her sister's child, although most women of Loa preferred to stay apart for their labor, she had secretly rejoiced, knowing before the labor this was the child for which she had waited all her life.

 Holding the newborn in her left arm, A'ruz fumbled in the prayer bag at her waist and produced a large, clear crystal. A quartz nugget the size of a raven's egg, the crystal gleamed and scintillated as the light from the fire collected in its depths. It became a living thing in the old woman's knotted fingers.

 Intoning a guttural prayer, A'ruz held the bright bauble before the infant and watched as her tiny hands reached for the crystal. The flower mouth once more resumed its tender smile. Avoiding contact with the baby's batting hands, A'ruz placed the crystal in the center of the child's forehead, at its exact center, where the God Eye in men creates visions of the past and the future for those who know the secrets of its awakening.

 "This one will soar as the condor," she muttered after a careful perusal of the crystal. "Her name shall be exalted, her deeds will change the course of history for The People ...," The old woman's voice trailed off, caught up in the baby's crow of delight at the bright thing above her head.

 "This one will give the people a gift more precious than gold or jade," A'ruz stopped suddenly as if uncertain as to how to interpret the visions the crystal presented. "This one shall be a child of destiny," she stopped at last. Spent, she gave the tiny child to Nana and looked at her sister priestess who huddled over her pot of smoldering herbs.

 Mix'la cast down her eyes for the terror in A'ruz's eyes had been frightening to behold. She puffed harder on her incense to drive away evil spirits that seemed to congregate in the corners of the room, and she continued her chant as clouds of fragrant smoke carried her prayers upward to the ears of the Goddess ....

 "Now is the hour of birth,

 The Sun rejoices.

 Now is the hour of life,

 The Moon dances.

 Now is the hour of destiny, The Earth stands still ...."

***

 Somehow, although this song was sung in honor of every child born to The People, it took on a new meaning to the four women in Maya's room that afternoon. Having not ever once cried since the moment of her entrance into the world, the child in Nana's arms gazed quietly at her kinswoman.

 "What name will you give this child?" The priestess's voice was as hard as the black obsidian knife she had used to sever the umbilical cord. She looked to the baby's mother for a reply.

 Maya lay silent on her mat, exhausted and bewildered. Her shoulders moved slightly, perhaps in denial, and when she spoke, her voice was as broken as the sound of a pottery bowl falling from a high shelf.

 "Qwana," she whispered, and fell back into her silence.

 Nana stroked her sister's arm to comfort her and turned, bewildered, to the Mamacuna. Surely this choice of name would anger the Holy Women, for she knew "Qwana" was the name of a legendary goddess, the sister of the Great Sun, a kindly spirit who had brought the gift of corn to The People and taught the women how to make it into bread and beer. A gentle and generous goddess, to be sure, but to use the holy name for a mortal child would surely be sacrilege.

 How could Maya think of giving her child the name of a Goddess? Nana studied her sister's face and looked for a sign Maya had petitioned the Goddess in her anguish and did not truly mean to take the name of an immortal for her own daughter.

 When the new mother remained wrapped in stubborn silence, the older priestess spoke once again.

 "It is well," she said firmly. "This One shall be named Qwana for the Goddess. One day we will recall her destiny in the songs of our storytellers."

 With that, A'ruz smiled, the furrows of her face melted in new and terrible patterns. She blessed the new child of The People and put her to her mother's breast to suckle ....

 These things Qwana knew, although she was no longer sure if the memories of the day of her birth were her own memories, or those of her aunt, A'ruz, and Mix'la, the priestesses who watched her grow.

 The Mamacuna had taken her from her mother's lonely hearth in the first season of her womanhood to the temple. There they taught her to plot the phases of the moon with intricate calculations, and to brew the sacred maize beer for their holy ceremonies.

 According to her mother and Nana, Qwana owed the Mamacuna her life. All through her childhood they had told her so.

 But a life is a hard thing to give away when one is young. The secrets of the temple seemed scarcely more interesting than the simpler secrets of more common women. Qwana could plant and spin and prepare food, as could most of the girls in her birth group, except for the fools _ those whose spirits remained with the Gods, and who never worked, but sat in the sun with feathers stuck to their fingers for toys

 Unlike her contemporaries, however, Qwana could also brew medicines and was becoming a fair hand at predicting the future, for others, if not for herself.

 Only one thing she was forbidden. Never in her days would she be permitted to take a young man into the wilderness to learn in innocence the arts of love. As a temple virgin she was technically forbidden to taste the joys of the flesh, although Qwana knew the time would come when she would be required to sacrifice her maidenhead to the priests of the Sun.

 For Qwana, who would never know the tenderness of a lover, the loss of her virginity could come as a sacrifice to a strong and terrible God. It was possible that very sacrifice might also mean her death, for it was not unusual among her people for young virgins to be slain to honor the Sun God after they had been deflowered by the priests.

 "I think too much," Qwana said to herself. This last day of freedom was too good to dwell on thoughts of death and sacrifice. The sun shone hot upon her shoulders and the air carried the perfume of a hundred city cook fires.

 Qwana turned away from the workers she watched, and walked back toward the city where many tens of souls lived beneath the protection of the temple.

 Before gaining the walled city of Loa, Qwana did one thing. Stopping beside a ceque, a holy stopping place of piled stones, she secreted a bolas, a killing sling tipped with rounded stones which was whirled around the head and loosed at one's quarry. To these she added a carefully worked bow and a handful of matching arrows. Forbidden the toys of girlhood, Qwana had watched the youths her age at play and imitated their hunting games until she could track and shoot a cava, the small, burrowing pig of the earth, as well as any of her brothers.

 As a priestess, however, she would be fed, and would not need these toys of childhood to hunt and slay her food. As she hid the weapon, she wondered if she would ever return to claim them, ever walk the plain in freedom again.

 The time for initime, and Qwana looked forward to the ceremony with anticipation and fear. She had seen the High Priest, Xil'pu, staring at her more than once when she participated as a novice in the Mamacuna's rites, and she recognized the naked lust in his eyes.

 He would not hesitate to claim a virgin from the temple initiates. Even if the Mamacuna were supposed to remain chaste.

 Xil'pu did not honor the rules that bound common men. Only Qwana's solitary place as a novice without sisters had protected her thus far. She doubted her immunity would last forever.  No woman, high born or low, had the right to refuse the High Priest. Not even the Mamacuna could refuse his demands for their flesh and expect to live. In fact, Mix'la, who with her withered hands and weather_beaten face seemed far beyond the fires of womanhood, still responded to Xil'pu's summons on occasion, and returned in a day, or three, sore and hurting from his excesses.

 Qwana knew she would share a similar fate, and wished she had a real family, that her father had not so coldly turned his face from her mother when she was born.

 She wished her mother had taken a new husband and kindled a new hearth fire, instead of cherishing her grief and anger, and kept her by her side until the joyful day each spring when the unmarried men and women of a particular age were formed in long, straight lines, sometimes jostling each other for places so they might be joined to the partners of their hearts, and married by the priests in the Courtyard of the Sun. But wishes such as this were for silly dreamers, and Qwana knew that being chosen as a woman of the temple was an honor she did not dare refuse, no matter how bitter a fate it seemed on this last day of her freedom. She also feared the High Priest, who envied and feared the powers of the temple women.

 Young as Qwana was, she had already witnessed a number of Xil'pu's sacrificial ceremonies to Father Sun. Upon each event certain portions of the citizenry of Loa, which were divided into neighborhoods of ten families each under the supervision of one man who answered in turn to his superior, who was then responsible for communities of one hundred families, had been commanded to attend, and with them all, the Mamacuna, who brought Qwana, with them as a matter of course.

 The first such ceremony, witnessed when Qwana was no more than ten, just after the first of the ceremonial lines of womanhood had been tattooed upon her forehead, had seemed to remain the most horrible in her eyes, for she had been innocent of the cruelty men do in the name of goodness, had not known what to expect.

 That day Qwana learned that sacrifices were not really pleasant holidays. She could not understand why The People seemed to celebrate them as such. Sacrifices were serious business, there was blood involved, and they were never pleasant.

 As she sat beside the ceque where her bow was concealed, Qwana thought back to the first sacrifice she had witnessed. The Sun burned hot as she and the elder priestesses approached the temple of the Sun, and Qwana fought a wave of nausea when she saw the altar, black with the blood of forgotten offerings. As she recalled the hour, she remembered the words of her teacher.

 A'ruz, usually kind and vocal, had seemed cold and without life as she recalled a day she had been forced to watch as her own child died upon that sacred plateau. The child, a fruit of a secret mating between herself and the High Priest during the days when A'ruz had been as lithe and beautiful as Qwana herself, had held out his tiny arms to her in the moment before his death.

 "I bore my child in solitude, in secret," the whishiver down Qwana's spine as the priestess leaned close so none could overhear. "And I bit through the umbilical cord with my teeth so no base substance might touch the spirit of my son as we were separated. One moon was I allowed to cherish and nurture my child, whose limbs were as sturdy as a tree. Then I was called to place him upon this altar. You will see," A'ruz continued darkly. "What priceless offerings I have made in this lifetime."

 The old woman seemed to study the altar, but Qwana sensed A'ruz had somehow commanded her spirit to leave the scene. Shivering with unnamed dread, she'd wished she knew the secret so she could join her mentor in the otherwhere.

 A'ruz had entered an escape of sorts, but Qwana remembered how she had watched, transfixed, as the seven virgins approached the altar, beautiful in their nakedness, oiled bronze skin and long hair shining in the sun. Flowers of every kind were strewn at the girls' feet and knotted in their oiled midnight hair as they marched to the clapping of hands and the soaring voices of praise for their devotion to the Sun. Drums throbbed a rhythm and clay flutes in the shapes of gods and men threw notes like sparkling embers into the square.

 "Aiee ...!" The mass of humanity in the courtyard roared their approval as the seven virgins were laid upon the altar and violated by seven priests who had the bodies of men but whose heads were concealed by masks fashioned in the shapes of the cruel hunting birds of the air. The air smelled of lust and agony.

 Virgin's blood ran crimson and thick upon the stones of their bed. The young women cried out for mercy as the drugged priests disported themselves upon their quaking bodies. Three times each priest lay with his virgin partner while the onlookers fondled themselves and their partners and even engaged in smelly copulations upon the beautifully red and blue and green tiled floor of the temple courtyard.

 Qwana, who had not yet tasted the agony and pleasures of the flesh, watched, breathless, horrified at the cries of the sacrificed, was yet filled with a searing inner fire that made her breath come in harsh, ragged gasps. Something else, not fear or disgust, ... something feral tore at her vitals, pounding in rhythm to the throbbing of the priest's ceremonial drums.

 "Control yourself, Daughter," A'ruz noticed Qwana's restlessness and put her hand on the girl's arm. "Such sacrifices will not likely be demanded of you for some time to come. Do not bring them to you before your time." She looked into the middle distance, as if gathering the words she must speak.

 "As a Mamacuna, you must refuse such honors from common men. But the priests are above the common rule, and the day will come when you must submit to them. You will not escape this fate forever. I have seen how Xil'pu has looked upon you. I have seen this, and I will protect you as long as I can, but know this, Qwana, in time you must make proper obeisance to the priesthood. It has been thus since a time no longer remembered, and you can do nothing to change it. This you know, but I must tell you again and again for when the time comes, you will feel betrayed, and you need to understand that such sacrifices have always been, that they will always be made."

 "I do not wish to lie with him," Qwana whispered, feeling slightly sick and terribly sorry for the girls who now lay spent and bruised on their nuptial bed of stone. "But those people below, why do they behave as animals, copulating on the street, showing their private parts to the Sun?"

 "Some of The People remember the old ways," A'ruz shot her a warning glance that told Qwana she was questioning a thing she should not. "There was a time, very long ago, when men and animals mated, but that has been forbidden since before my birth, and for that I am grateful. My grandmother once told me a story of her cousin, Rozne, who was sacrificed to a llama as a little girl. She never lived to feel the priest's knife ...."

 Qwana gasped, cutting off the grotesque story. A woman, naked, except for her facial markings and an intricate design of bloody crimson slashes across her body, moved toward the altar, an infant of no more than a moon or two held high above her head.

 "What do they mean to do with the baby?" Qwana blurted. Her stomach turned. An only child, she had often longed for a baby brother or sister to ease her loneliness.

 The people in the square roared and looked toward the altar. The moment of greatest sacrifice had come.

 Then the High Priest arrived.

 Xil'pu, first servant to the Sun, knew the value of a magnificent entrance. He suddenly appeared, carried into the courtyard on a litter borne on the shoulders of a dozen comely warrior_priests in kilted uniforms and leather breastplates.

 The High Priest was nearly naked beneath his cape of red and yellow feather weaving, but his face had been painted so that his hawk's features withdrew into the crimson and black designs. His hair was covered by bonnet of glowing feathers gathered from the many birds that lived in the jungle foothills of the great purple mountains. Around his hips, but not masking his manhood, which was large and half erect in response to the excitement of the hour, was the dappled skin of a jaguar, the fastest and cruelest animal on the plain.

 Xil'pu's eyes, as black as obsidian, and quite as hard, scanned the gathering and stopped only when they reached the shelter Qwana shared with the Mamacuna. They seemed to bore into her very soul. He smiled at the young initiate.

 Qwana had all she could do not to hide her face in her red woolen skirt.

 "Do not look away," A'ruz hissed. "Men like the High Priest feed upon the fear of the helpless." She poked the girl in the ribs to cause her to sit up straighter. "Show him you are worthy of being a handmaiden to the Goddess."

 And so Qwana returned the Xil'pu's icy stare and prayed he could not see the pounding of her heart through her ceremonial vestments.

 If he did, the priest gave no sign. Instead, he turned to the altar. The chanting of the faithful increased in volume and intensity as he took the squalling infant from the woman's hands and held it high over his head.

 Qwana felt as if the baby's cries would pierce her soul. She could not move, so terrible was the spectacle she witnessed.

 Xil'pu looked her way again, then turned and walked slowly around the altar which surmounted the great pyramid of stone that was the Temple of the Sun. Once, twice, three times he circuited the great stone, and then lay the child in the slimy leavings of the virgins who had been removed, weeping and bleeding, to be enjoyed further by his priests at their leisure.

 He chanted a prayer as he walked and the prayer was taken up by The People. A thousand voices grumbled like thunder.

 "Father Sun,       Who walks the Sky       Like thunder,      Accept the gifts      We bring ....

 Father Sun,       Who makes the crops        Grow tall,      Accept the gifts      We bring ....

 Father Sun, Who gives us life       Each moment,       Accept the gifts       We bring ...."

 The prayer was long. Incense swirled and bunched like thunder heads over the plaza. The astrologers solemnly predicted a starving time for The People. Only blood could change the course of this dire prophecy.

 Qwana wondered why could not The People prosper under a gentler rain than the scattered droplets of an innocent's blood?

 The prayer stopped suddenly.

 Qwana held her breath.