The boy had reached the temple about midnight, but it was almost four o’clock before he found a way up the walls and through the ninety courtyards to the Bishop’s Tower. No one had challenged him. The temple was almost deserted, for most of the guards had been sent away to war, and most of the rest were out patrolling the city. There was almost no one left but seminarians and priests—blind priests, fat priests, priests with no legs, inadequate as sentinels, though they never slept. Their conjuring had filled the courts with acrid fog, impenetrable except to atheists. They had sealed the gates and doorways with powerful geometry, but the boy was too ignorant to know. He was following the cat. When it leapt up on the balustrade, he followed it. Along the rooftops, the tiles were slippery in the sweet rain, and by the time he had climbed up all the gutters and drainpipes, up to the single lighted window in the bishop’s tower, he was too exhausted to stand. The way had been dangerous for him, and he had kept to streambeds and ravines along the road out from the city. There had been nothing to eat. So that finally, when he found the right drainpipe and climbed up, he barely had the strength to drag himself over the sill.

The bishop was standing with his cat in her arms, cleaning its fur.

This was the room where she lived. It was small and spare, with walls of quilted silk. Part of it was a private temple lit with candles, and the wind from the open window roughened the light. Outside, lightning caressed the hills, soft and thunderless. The boy was shivering with cold. He stared at her, and she could see a wish for violence mix with confusion in his eyes as she smiled and put her hand out. She released a small magic and put a little sleep into the air, so that he dropped his head. He curled up on the floor, and she could hear his breathing settle down.

For a moment she stood and looked at him, stroking the cat. Then she put it down and found a towel and dry clothes, sacred vestments from the temple. She knelt down near him on the linen mats, wiping the water from his body, touching him with a kind of wonder. Even though she was the goddess of love and mistress of the seven arts of love, this was the first man she had touched. He was the youngest, the largest, the most beautiful that she had seen, for her life had been spent within the confines of the temple, among priests and parsons. On festival days she had heard petitions in her own shrine, and she had peered at the congregation from behind the slits in her masks. But in all those shambling lines of worshipers there had never been anyone as magnificent as this, and she touched him with a kind of reverence, stripping off his clothes. The leather cloak seemed so unsuitable, so stiff, so uncomfortable.