When Voiha Wakes (Novella) by Joy Chant

Author:Joy Chant [Chant, Joy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy
ISBN: 9780553198478
Publisher: Golden Apple Publishers; Doubleday
Published: 1985-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Whether Voiha dreamed them so, or whether the life of Halilak made them so, it was true that few men looked beyond the immediate future. Mairilek was not one of them. It was Rahiké who began to think anxiously of the years to come. Now that she had begun to understand the magnitude and strangeness of his gift she wondered how much still lay beyond her comprehension, and how Naramethé was to accommodate such a thing. She had respected what he did from the first, moved by his dedication, but when she believed a new God was speaking, she grew afraid. How could Naramethé receive a new God and not be changed? If it would not change, what would become of the Deity’s servants? What would become of Naramethé? The Holy Ones could not be rejected, and they were a strong sisterhood. Goddesses when they chose to reveal them­sel­ves must be honored, or all Heaven was insulted.

Rahiké loved and valued stability, and abhorred anything that threatened it; the revulsion was learned so young by women of her race, and buried so deep in them, that it was almost an instinct. They hated change. In those days she remembered a terrible thing that had happened in the Town when she was a child. Two men had fought: not the childish scuffling that little boys were shamed out of, not the quick blow derided and punished in older youths, but a real fight, that had brought the Town to a shocked halt and left both men injured. Like wild dogs, said all who had seen it. For a year afterwards both men had dragged burdens like beasts, their criminal hands locked into wooden yokes, and children had screamed and fled from the sight of them. But little Rahiké had lived for weeks in a terror that caused her to hide from the burly uncles whose strength she had loved until then; fearing that a law once broken was destroyed, its protection gone. Now that fear came back to her, and the understanding that those men had broken something even more precious than law; they had broken custom.

And so had she. She felt herself two people, one rebuking the other. That she, the Young Mistress, should have done this! She, who should know better than any that law and custom were not to be defied, that they were the mortar of society and its safeguard against disintegration. Not respecting the Town, she had not sufficiently respected its laws. It had seemed nothing terrible to bring him the music box, to offer him a place to practice; nothing of the men’s world was a serious matter. She had tossed a stone carelessly, and now behind her heard the rumble of the avalanche.

This was not a game, a pastime he could pursue bet­ween making pots. It seemed her mother had been right after all, and Mekiné, and the Town. The only safe thing to do with such a gift as his was to crush it,

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