Epiphany of the Long Sun Read Online Free PDF Page B

build a sacred fire on the altar. We will need a big one today-"
    They cheered, surprising her.
    "We'll need a big one, and some of the wood will be wet. But the whole sky is going to be our god gate this afternoon, letting in Lord Pas's fire from the sun."
    Like so many brightly-colored ants, a straggling line of little girls had already begun to carry pieces of split cedar to the altar, where Maytera Marble broke the smallest pieces.
    "It is Patera Silk's custom to consult the Writings before sacrificing. Let us do so too." Maytera Mint held up the book and opened it at random.
    Whatever it is we are, it is a little flesh, breath, and the ruiing part. As if you were dying, despise the flesh; it is blood, bones, and network, a tissue of nerves and veins. See the breath also, what kind of thing it is: air, and never the same, but at every moment sent Out and drawn in. The third is the ruling part. No longer let this part be enslaved, no longer let it be pulled by its strings like a marionette. No longer complain of your lot, nor shrink from the future.
    "Patera Silk has told us often that each passage in the Writings holds two meanings at least." The words slipped out before she realized that she could see only one in this one. Her mind groped frantically for a second interpretation.
    "The first seems so clear that I feel foolish explaining it, though it is my duty to explain it. All of you have seen it already, I'm sure. A part, two parts as the Chrasmologic writer would have it, of our dear Maytera Rose has perished. We must not forget that it was the baser part, the part that neither she nor we had reason to value. The better part, the part beloved by the gods and by us who knew her, will never perish. This, then, is the message for those who mourn her. For my dear sib and me, particularly."
    Help me! Hierax, Kypris, Sphigx, please help!
    She had touched the sword of the officer who had come to arrest Silk; her hand itched for it, and something deep within her, denied until this moment, scanned the crowd.
    "I see a man with a sword." She did not, but there were scores of such men. "A fine one. Will you come forward, sir? Will you lend me your sword? It will be for only a moment."
    A swaggering bully who presumably believed that she had been addressing him shouldered a path through the crowd. It was a hunting sword, almost certainly stolen, with a shell guard, a stag grip, and a sweeping double-edged blade.
    "Thank you." She held it up, the polished steel dazzling in the hot sunshine. "Today is Hieraxday. It is a fitting day for final rites. I think it's a measure of the regard in which the gods held Maytera Rose that her eyes were darkened on a Tarsday, and that her last sacrifice takes place on Hieraxday. But what of us? Don't the Writings speak to us, too? Isn't it Hieraxday for us, as well as for Maytera? We know they do. We know it is.
    "You see this sword?" The denied self spoke through her, so that she-the little Maytera Mint who had, for so many years, thought herself the only Maytera Mint-listened with as much amazement as the crowd, as ignorant as they of what her next word might be. "You carry these, many of you. And knives and needlers, and those little lead clubs that nobody sees that strike so hard. And only Hierax himself knows what else. But are you ready to pay the price?"
    She brandished the hunting sword above her head. There was a white stallion among the victims; a flash of the blade or some note in her voice made him rear and paw the air, catching his presenter by surprise and lifting him off his feet.
    "For the price is death. Not death thirty or forty years from now, but death now! Death today! These things say, I will not cower to you! Jam no slave, no ox to be led to the butcher! Wrong me, wrong the gods, and you die! For I fear not death or you! "
    The roar of the crowd seemed to shake the street.
    "So say the Writings to us, friends, at this manteion. That is the second meaning." Maytera Mint