the hall to a small prayer room adjacent to the women’s portion of our household chapel. I remembered the room well, though I had not entered it since I was a child and in my mother’s daily care.
The room had not changed. A half-circle of stone bench faced the meditation wall. At one end of the bench a small, well-tended brazier burned smokelessly. At the other end, a stone bowl held a pool of placid water. A mural of the good god’s blessings covered the meditation wall, with niches in the art where offerings of incense could be set. Two alcoves already held glowing bars of incense. A dark green mint-scented bar burned low in a niche painted like a harvest basket, an offering for good crops. A fat black wedge released the scent of anise into the air as it glimmered, nearly spent, in the niche for good health that hovered over a cherubic child’s head.
With housewifely efficiency, my mother removed the anise incense with a pair of black tongs reserved for that task. She carried it to the small worship pool; it hissed as she dunked it in, and she stood a moment in reverent silence as the remains of the anise brick settled to the bottom. She took a clean white cloth from a stack of carefully folded linens and carefully wiped the alcove clean.
‘Choose the next offering, Nevare,’ she invited me over her shoulder. She smiled as she said those words and I almost smiled back. As a child, I had always vied with my sisters for the privilege of choosing. I had forgotten how important that had once been to me.
There was a special cabinet with one hundred small drawers, each holding a different scent of incense. I stood before the intricately carved front, considering all my choices and then asked, ‘Why are you sacrificing for health? Who is ill?’
She looked surprised. ‘Why – I burn it for you, of course. That you may recover from what you have— what has befallen you.’
I stared at her, torn between being touched by her concern and being annoyed that she thought her prayers and silly scented offerings could help me. An instant later I recognized that I did think her incense sacrifices were silly. They were play-acting, religion by rote, an offering that cost us so little as to be insignificant. How, I suddenly wanted to know, did burning a brick of leaves and oil benefit the good god? What sort of a foolish merchant god did we worship, that he dispensed blessings in exchange for smoke? I felt suddenly that my life teetered on an eroded foundation. I did not even know when I had stopped having confidence in such things. I only knew it was gone. The protection of the good god had once stood between all darkness and me. I had thought it a fortress wall; it had been a lace curtain.
The elaborately carved, gilded and lacquered cabinet before me had once seemed a gleaming casket of mystery. ‘It’s just furniture,’ I said aloud. ‘A chest of drawers full of incense blocks. Mother, nothing in here is going to save me. I don’t know what will. If I did, I wouldn’t hesitate to do it. I’d even be willing to offer blood sacrifice to the old gods if I thought it would work. Cecile Poronte’s family does.’ It was the first time I’d mentioned that to anyone. In the days since the wedding, I’d felt no inclination to share any conversation at all with my father.
My mother paled at my words. Then she carefully corrected me. ‘Cecile is a Burvelle now, Nevare. Cecile Burvelle.’ She stepped past me and opened the sage drawer of the cabinet. Sage for wisdom. She took out a fist-sized greenish brick of incense and carried it to the worship brazier. With gilded tongs, she held it to the slumbering coals, stooping to blow through pursed lips to wake their ashed red to glowing scarlet. A slender tendril of smoke rose to scent the room and one corner of the sage brick caught the charcoal’s red kiss. She did not look at me as she bore the sage incense to the alcove for health and tucked it safely inside.
She stood for a moment in silent prayer. Habit urged me to join her there and I suddenly wished I could. But my soul felt dry and bereft of faith. No words of praise or entreaty welled in me, only hopelessness. When my mother turned aside from the mural, I said, ‘You knew the Porontes worship the old gods, didn’t you? Does father know?’
She shook her head impatiently. I don’t know if she was answering my question or dismissing it. ‘Cecile is a Burvelle now,’ she insisted. ‘It no longer matters what she did in the past. She will worship the good god alongside us every Sixday, and her children will be raised to do the same.’
‘Did you see the dead birds?’ I asked her abruptly. ‘Did you see that ghastly little carousel in their garden?’
She pursed her lips as she came to take a seat on the bench. She patted a space beside her and I sat down reluctantly. She spoke softly. ‘They invited me to witness it. Cecile’s mother sent an invitation to your sisters and me. The words were cloaked but I understood what it was about. We arrived too late. Deliberately.’ She paused for a moment and then advised me sincerely, ‘Nevare, let this go. I don’t think that they truly worship the old gods. It is more a tradition, a form to be observed rather than any true belief. The women of their family have always made such offerings. Cecile made the Bride’s Gift to Orandula, the old god of balances. The slain birds are a gift to the carrion bird incarnation of Orandula. His own creatures are killed and then offered back to him to feed his own. It’s a balance. The hope is that the woman offering the sacrifice will not lose any children to stillbirth or cradle death.’
‘Does trading dead birds for live children make any sense to you?’ I demanded. And then, rudely I added, ‘Do you really find any sense in burning a block of leaves to make the good god give us what we ask?’
She looked at me strangely. ‘That’s an odd question to be troubling a soldier son, Nevare. But perhaps it is because you were born to be a soldier that you ask it. You are applying the logic of man to a god. The good god is not bound by our human logic or measurements, son. On the contrary, we are bound by his. We are not gods, to know what pleases a god. We were given the Holy Writ, so that we might worship the good god as will please him, rather than offering him things that might please a man. I, for one, am very grateful. Imagine a god who dealt as men do: what would he demand of a bride in exchange for future children? What might such a god ask of you as recompense to restore your lost beauty? Would you want to pay it?’
She was trying to make me think, but her last words stung me. ‘Beauty? Lost beauty? This is not a matter of vanity, Mother! I am trapped in this bulky body and nothing I do seems to change it. I cannot put on my boots or get out of bed without being bound by it. How can you assume you can even imagine what it is like for me to be a prisoner in my own flesh.’
She looked at me silently for a few moments. Then a small smile passed her lips. ‘You were too small to remember my pregnancies with Yaril and Vanze. Perhaps you cannot even remember what I looked like before my last two children were born.’ She lifted her arms as if inviting me to consider it. I glanced at her and away. Time and childbearing had thickened her body, but she was my mother. She was supposed to look that way. I could, vaguely, recall a younger, slender mother who had chased me laughing through the freshly planted garden in our early years at Widevale. And I did recall her last pregnancy with Vanze. I most recalled how she had lumbered through the rooms of the house on her painfully swollen feet.
‘But that’s not the same thing at all,’ I retorted. ‘The changes then and now, those are natural changes. What has befallen me is completely unnatural. I feel as if I am trapped in some Dark Evening costume that I cannot shed. You are so caught up in looking at my body that all of you, Father, Yaril and even you, cannot perceive that within I am still Nevare! The only thing that has changed is my body. But I am treated as if I am these walls of fat rather than the person trapped behind them.’
My mother allowed a small silence to settle between us before she observed, ‘You seem very angry at us, Nevare.’
‘Well, of course I am! Who would not be, in these circumstances?’
Again she made that quiet space before suggesting in a reasonable voice, ‘Perhaps you should direct that anger against your real enemy, to add greater strength to your will to change yourself.’
‘My will?’ My anger surged again. ‘Mother, it has nothing to do with my will. My discipline has not failed. I work from dawn to dusk. I eat less than I did as a child. And still, I continue to