The farmers had dug their canals out beyond that shoreline, figuring that the lake would continue to grow, although naturally no one had any idea if it would ever refill the old basin, or grow beyond it. Most of the adult population was out there today building more fields out of dirt and mud, or tending to young plants waxing in earth planted and tended over the last few months.

He-Who-Burns showed his face intermittently. Those who had walked in the shadows told her that in the days before there came for certain months of the year a time with rain, and after that a time when He-Who-Burns baked the Earth with his blazing fire. There were two seasons, together with the passages between them, tied to the equinox. It was still early in the year, in the time of rains when all things grew, watered both within and without in the field that is Earth. Although the city had lost its abundance during the time of exile, it seemed that after all, having returned to Earth, that the gods had not changed their minds. They still wanted their children to flourish, to make a new home all over again.

“Feather Cloak! You are too bold!”

“Feather Cloak! You must not let the noonday sun touch you!”

“Feather Cloak! You were to approach on the eastern causeway. This is the causeway for merchants and artisans!”

“Feather Cloak! Have you come to begin work on restoring the temples? All else means nothing if the proper rituals are not observed!”

“How are you come to leave the sacred precinct in the Heart-of-the-World’s-Beginning? Who allowed this to happen, in this month? It was not the proper time!”

The blood knives, the ones who had set up residence in the temple in the center of the city on the lake, had seen her coming. They swarmed like wasps out along the causeway to meet her, and to castigate her. She fanned herself with a fan built of green-and-gold feathers, the mark of the most holy bird sacred to She-Who-Creates, and because of this gesture they fell silent according to their own laws and their own customs.

“It is time to see the market opened,” she said to them, and to her bearers she said, “We will move on.”

The causeway was not yet surrounded by water, and there were some children off to one side digging in the mud for roots or seeking tadpoles, young frogs, grubs, crickets, or other such treats. They gaped to see the litter pass, and the blood knives shouted at them for their lack of respect and modesty.

“Why are they not at their study in the house of youth?” Feather Cloak asked them, and after that they considered her words more thoughtfully.

The procession entered the city through the gate of skulls and moved on toward the central precinct. Many folk had returned to the city, but in any case only one house out of twenty was inhabited. In the days before, according to the census undertaken in the days before by the blood knives, the city had been organized into five bundles of wards, and each ward had been organized into a bundle of neighborhoods each populated by forty households of ten to twenty people each. It was difficult for her to imagine so many people, but the empty quarters told their own story.