The Lady by K. V. Johansen Page B

with me. Keeping faith with my mother. Keeping faith with Ilbialla, who was goddess of our ancestors here, with her brother Gurhan of the Hill and sister the Lady of the well, in equal respect and equal love, time out of mind. I was the orphan the master of the Doves took to raise with his own children. The little cousin who was no cousin. My name was Esau, once. On the day the Lady’s temple guard murdered the priestess of Ilbialla, my mother, and hacked my grandmother and my infant sister to pieces in the earthquake-ruins of our house, the master of the Doves saved me. You all, all you folk who live about the market square, all who knew or suspected and kept silent, saved me, so that I am here today to tell you, now is our time. Now we, who kept faith in the shadows and the silence, must save our city.”
    Jugurthos forced his attention back to the audience, drawn nearer by the passion of Hadidu’s words. He watched for the incongruous movement against the light of the bonfires, the reach for bow or javelin or stone. Hard not to turn and stare at the priest, though, as rapt as they. If he didn’t know Ilbialla to be sealed or dead within the tomb, he would have thought his friend god-touched, inspired, speaking, if not prophecy, then words of divinity nonetheless.
    â€œDo I need to tell you of the evils done in the Lady’s name, these three decades past? The murders, the folk slain in the streets by bullies and thugs in the uniform of a private army, no better than an invading barbarian horde, acknowledging no law of the people? The men and women and even children taken, who are never seen again? Marakand was a great city, famed for its library, for its scholars, its wisdom. Where are our wizards now? What folk slaughters its own divinely blessed, who should be there for its aid and comfort? The temple of the Lady, which used to feed the homeless and the hungry, became nothing more than an invading warband, led by a tyrant such as took Lissavakail in the mountains, oppressing the folk, killing those who spoke against it as the senators faithful in upholding the law of the city were killed, with a barbarity you wouldn’t find even in Nabban. Was that the act of a goddess? Of a holy priesthood, a temple founded to care for the poor and the sick? Such charity was ever the true Lady’s calling. And like a warband the false temple has robbed the folk for its own gain, its priests grown fat on your poverty, your taxes supporting its agents of your oppression, feeding an army, the temple guards, whose only real enemy is you, the folk. It has divided us from our neighbours, turned kin against kin, friend against friend—suburb against city—to stop us uniting against our oppressor, who is the false Lady of Marakand.”
    Movement, far closer than Jugurthos expected. He had seen no one crossing the square. He turned, crouched into the darkness, saw a man intercepted by a pair of guardsmen to stand, hands raised in a gesture denying threat. Caravaneer; he made out the silhouette of knee-length coat and braids. And a sabre at his side. He wasn’t one of those who had come in with the sandal-maker; none of those had moved from the group on the other side of the tomb. No way any others should have been let armed through the city gate. No way anyone should have been let through the city gate at all.
    â€œAnd we must unite. We must stand against this devil—for the rumours you have heard are true. The thing that calls itself the Lady is a devil, one of the seven of the north. We have a duty, not only to ourselves, to our parents, our dead, not only to our living, to our children, our future, not even a duty to our lost gods, but to all humanfolk, and to the gods of the high places and the goddesses of the waters and the demons of the wild. We have a duty, under the Old Great Gods, to stand against the devils and deny them the place they would take in this world.”
    Jugurthos dropped from