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"The Sacred Collegium, yes."
"-with regional over-priests in the rest of the country all reporting back to someone appointed by him."
"Yes," Odikweos said, shrugging and smiling slightly. "Many have praised his piety in bestowing these beautiful God-houses on the realm, and skilled servants to attend them. Is it any wonder that the Gods have favored him so?"
Was there a slight astringent edge to the Achaean's voice? I hope so, but then I'm listening for my life as well as talking for it. And he wasn't in the backwoods here. This might not be Egypt or Babylon, but it was an old and sophisticated civilization in its way.
Vulnerable, though. Writing had been a rare thing here until Walker came, used only for accounting and administration. From the number of street signs and quasi billboards, he'd put a lot of ooomph into teaching the three R's-and didn't this archaic Greek look odd written in the Latin alphabet! The first generation of literates in any culture tended to be pretty gullible about print. They also didn't have a word for "religion," or a concept of it as something separate from everyday life, that could be manipulated as an entity.
I'll give you any odds that Walker's got his tame priesthood working on some sort of Holy Scripture, too-a pagan Koran or Book of Oracles or something with the King of Men as the Numero Uno favored of Zeus Pater. I wonder what Odikweos would make of that?
There was no need to ask about the structure like a football stadium built into the side of a hill, with a mule-drawn trolley line ru
Nor much doubt about the smaller temple of gray-and-red stone on a nearby height. Instead of an exterior altar in front of the building, that had a ten-foot-high double-headed cobra making a circle in gilded cast bronze. It enclosed a sun and moon-black sun, black moon, under the flared fanged heads with their ivory teeth and ruby eyes. A party of women in rich clothing and delicately beautiful masks of black leather and silver led a man with his head covered in a sack up to it. The women stopped and bowed, then made a gesture with both fists clenched before the face, imitating the serpents, before they passed on into the temple proper.
"A few years ago it was just another snake cult," he quoted to himself in a low mutter. "And where's Conan when you need him?"
Behind the snake-sun-moon sigil was another bronze, a statue of a woman with three faces pointing in different directions-the Triple Hekate of the Crossroads. The rest of the figure wasn't at all Greek; more like Kali, multiple arms holding scalpels, bowls, knives, whips, fetters, human hearts-rendered quite accurately-and dancing in a hip-shot posture.
A tablet at the begi
Cold be hand, and heart, and bone;
And cold be sleep, under stone…
Ian Arnstein's lips quirked upward as he read; Tolkien translated quite well into Greek.
Then the ironic humor washed out of him like a candle guttering in a high wind as a long, high scream came down the hill, and he realized the man must have had the bag removed and seen his fate. The scream continued, with chanting ru
That wasn't Greek in inspiration either. Aztec, the way they'd displayed the results of their massacre-sacrifices.
It's like a theme park for demons. Walker and sado-bitch and the others have turned this place into their own multicultural sociopath's Disneyland. Except these are real people they're playing with.
He turned his eyes from Hong's temple and wished he could shut it out of his mind as well. Evil sweltered out of the very stones, like some vile metaphysical ooze that made his soul feel polluted, echoing with the agony within. He'd felt the same before, on a trip to Europe before the Event… at the gate of Dachau.
"This gift from your Island… some of us do not appreciate it here," Odikweos said softly.
"That is not something you can blame on us" Arnstein said. "Hong is an outlaw; were she back on Nantucket, we'd hang her."
He thought of trying to say she was crazy, but the closest you could come to saying that in this language meant literally possessed by spirits. The last thing he wanted to do was back up her claim to divine inspiration.
"Of course you would; she and the King are rebels against your ruler."
"No. We'd hang her for what she's done here."
The Achaean gave a noncommittal toss of his head. It was nearly dark now, the sun sinking crimson on the high peak to the westward; a steam whistle hooted mournfully somewhere.
More people were spilling onto the street, but the crowds parted before the chariot and mounted guards, some murmuring or pointing after a ripple of bows and salutes. Most of the streets were lined with colo
Or maybe he just read Howard Fast's Spartacus at an impressionable age.
There were statues here and there; they looked more Egyptian, with stiff forward-facing stances and hands clenched at their sides; probably because that was where Walker could get sculptors used to working in hard stone. There were fountains at the intersections, with women drawing water, and from the relative lack of smell there must be fairly good sewers as well.
No defenses ringed the city, but there was a wall topped with iron spikes and an openwork bronze gate between the common streets and the palace district. A huge rambling complex covered most of a large hill, terraces and columns, towers and bright tile and colored marble showing through gardens still fantastically lovely. His captor's guards and chariot turned aside, toward a mansion that was merely large.
"We will talk, after you have bathed and eaten," Odikweos said under the pillars of the entrance way. "There is much I have wished to learn."
Night had fallen by the time Marian Alston-Kurlelo had finished her rounds of the wounded. That was almost as hard as the battle itself.
The hospital smelled of antisepsis and pain, with an overtone of broth from the soup kettles being wheeled through for those who could use them. The first rush of emergency surgery was over, and most of the patients were lying quiet, but the lanterns in the operating theater were still burning bright. Nurses and doctors bustled by, sometimes stepping aside for a gurney with a prone patient, bags of saline drip suspended on poles.
One ward was much quieter, most of the patients there slipping quietly into the waiting darkness with their pain muffled by morphia. A priestess of the Ecumenical Church knelt murmuring beside a cot; she was just kissing the stola before lifting it over her head, and an open box beside her held a vial and wafers. Several Marines were kneeling there, too, some of them bandaged, heads bowed over clasped hands that held crucifix and rosary.
Price of doing business, Marian Alston-Kurlelo forced herself to think. It wasn't as if they'd introduced war here, and a bronze-tipped spear in the guts killed you just as painfully and just as dead as grapeshot. At least this is about something more than a cattle raid. Swindapa was weeping, a quiet trickle of tears from the cerulean-blue eyes, undramatic and matter-of-fact. Wish I could do that. Wouldn't do, though. The Midnight Mare's got to keep up the image for the crews.