I’m so thirsty that I drain the whole thing and hold it out for a refill before I even think about parasites or giardia. Hopefully Lachesis will save my innards from rebellion considering she wants me here. As I drink, Kina tells me about the cities that we’re close to, but that her people live in the plains called Farneath, near the edge of the enormous swamp. All the names she tells me are a blur, but I should have known better than to ask. All I need to know is where the god is and when he’s showing up.
“This is great, thank you, Kina,” I say after my third cup. “I think I know where I am now. Your family goes to the temple in the swamp? To pray? Do others? It looked very…old.”
She nods, her hands delicately clasped in her lap. I notice she’s dressed the same way I am, in a simple sheath. Her skin is tanned and warm. She wears a thin silver armband high on her upper arm, and a comb pulls her thick blonde hair back from her face.
“Oh, that temple has not been in use since the last Anticipation. We go there for prayers, as the lord of disease is one of the few gods that returns to the same place every time. He never changes where he arrives, and so we send prayers to him and ask that if he returns, that he be merciful to us, his faithful.”
Merciful? “He sounds fun.”
Her eyes widen in horror. “Oh no, Mistress. He’s dreadful!”
Clearly Kina missed my sarcasm. “I see. But you pray to him?”
“We pray to all the gods, but because Lord Kalos chooses to return here every Anticipation, we pray for his mercy and benevolence.” She hesitates and adds, “The signs and portents say he will return to this world soon.”
That matches what Lachesis said, so I simply nod. “Very soon. Like today or tomorrow. And… then what happens to the world when the gods appear?”
Her expression is solemn. “We pray for them to have mercy upon us.”
Greaaaat.
Chapter
Five
Ispend the rest of the day at Kina’s family’s farm. They’re really nice people, all of them with bushy blonde hair and bright smiles. They wear simple clothing and thick sandals on their feet, and I wander behind Kina through the day, since I don’t know what to do with myself. She says I should rest, but resting feels like the last thing I need to do when I’m supposed to be doing Important Stuff.
God-related important stuff.
So I trail after her, watching as she feeds the animals in their crude barn. It’s got an open face to one side, with more of the stucco walls under a thatched roof. There are wooden stall doors with hay trailing over the floor, and inside are not horses but big, fat creatures with enormous heads and even bigger bellies and dun hides. They remind me of a hippo. She calls them woales. One of the woales drags a plow through the field with Kina’s father holding it steady, and her mother works in their vegetable garden and shoots me nervous looks, as if the gods are going to smite her if she makes eye contact with mefor too long. I probably do seem a little strange to them. My hair is an unassuming brown, my skin pale compared to their sunny bronze, and I’m tall and a little on the thick side compared to their wiry frames. My hands are soft and my nails clean and rounded, unlike Kina’s work-chapped hands and broken, square nails that have a line of grime under the beds. It’s clear my days of “hard work” are very different than theirs.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, given that I felt like I had a moment to myself back home. This is an entirely different level of work, however. Kina's energy is endless. She finishes tending to the animals, then goes inside the small cottage and gets to work grinding spices from their cellar. When the spices are ground, she takes fresh milk and begins to churn it. Then she gets to work on her loom, her hands moving quicker than I ever thought possible. I offer to help out with the churning, but she takes one look at my plump arms and hands me the mortar and pestle instead and tasks me with grinding more spices to a fine powder.
As she works at a frantic pace, Kina chatters at me about how she wants to marry a boy that lives in town, but her parents need her help here on the farm. That he works with his father as a smith, so they haven’t yet figured out how they’re going to work things out. “I’d ask the goddess of love, but I’m sure she’s got other things on her mind right now, what with the Anticipation and all.”
“I think you should ask anyhow. Isn’t that her job?”
“Well, yes, but everyone knows that the gods come to the mortal realm during the Anticipation because they’re not doing things as they should.”
“Maybe she needs a reminder that she servesyou.”
Kina’s smile is amused. “How hard do you work for people when you’re told that you’re shite at your job?”
Excellent point. “You’re just going to wait for better timing to marry him? What if things never change?”
“You’re here, aren’t you? That’s proof enough to me that things are changing.”
Another excellent point. “Maybe when Kalos gets here, I can ask him to put in a good word?”
She freezes, terrified. “Oh, please don’t, Mistress Elsie. We don’t want to involve Lord Kalos at all. We want to avoid his gaze entirely.” She grabs a pinch of salt out of the salt cellar and tosses it over her shoulder, then goes back to her weaving. “Lord Kalos is angry at the goddess Belara anyhow. She was once his lover but no more.”
“Oh? I wonder why.” I don’t want to come between exes, even as a babysitter. That’s a quick way to get in over your head fast.
“The stories say he was a scorned lover. He was angry that she would not agree to become his bride, so he sent a plague to her followers.”
Yikes. Okay, Lachesis did mention that we wanted to keep Kalos as neutralized as possible. What was the word she used?Apathetic. If I asked him to put in a good word for poor Kina, he’d probably kill the entire village so the smith would be free to join her on the farm. I have to watch myself here. This isn’t my world, and I can’t think of things the way I did back home.
“Pray to the goddess anyhow,” I advise Kina. “Maybe just flatter her a lot instead of asking for specific things. We’ll skip asking Kalos anything.”
