But with me it has been hate, always hate, and hatred is a kind of love, a way of refusing to accept the cacophony of certain kinds of music in the world.

Along the river, his sweet brothers and his sisters lay as dead as meat. The images banged around his ears. And then suddenly Aspe saw, in the middle of that circle of discord, the bishop’s face, a poisonous harmony of black curls, black eyes, sweet skin. So young, she was. He struck the table with his steel fist.

Hatred, memories of hatred, cadenzas of hatred spun and jostled in his mind, until he cried: “Enough!

Great Angkhdt, enough. No more.”

* * *

The bishop tended the shrine in her turret chamber while the boy watched her from the bed. Unlike all but six in the city, it was a shrine not to Angkhdt but to God Himself, not to the servant but to the master.

In most temples, Angkhdt the prophet stood between men and the God of Love, but not here. The room smelled of lovemaking. She filled a crystal bowl on the altar from a ewer of water, reciting lists of prayers.

She had had a tiring day. She had consecrated forty newly gelded priests, their faces lumpy from painkillers and pain. And she had performed the feather celebration on the altar of St. Unity Bereft, a long boring dance whose significance was lost, but still it was recurrent in the endless calendar of worship. She had danced it once before, a little girl.

While she was gone, the boy had lain in bed. Today he seemed a little restless, she thought. He watched her with a curious absorption as she wrote symbols in the air above the bowl. The cat covered his lap, and he stroked the long fur under its throat and around its slitted eyes.

“Something bad happened,” he said.

The rain was pouring down. The bishop shivered in her white dress, because that day she had felt the same thing, and when she was talking to her secretary, she had thought it would be a relief to know something of the world. The heart beats in darkness, separate from the brain, the old man would say. She accepted that, but sometimes it would be a relief to know: there was a war, and it had gotten closer.

She had seen a stiffening desperation in her secretary and the members of her council, in their dedication to the small details of worship. But for a few days now there had been something like triumph in the old man’s chicken step, and his attention had been inclined to wander. True, the feather dance was a terrible ordeal. During some of the slower movements, she had been inclined to doze herself.

But sometimes she thought that since the land, and the people, and everything that breathed belonged to her, she should be allowed to take a closer interest. Sometimes as she sat in her own temple in the clothes of the living goddess, listening to supplications, she could catch wisps of news—a mother’s prayer for four sons in the army, a wife’s prayer for her husband. Knowledge bred opinions, and opinions interfered with love, that’s what her secretary said. He would tell her what had happened sometimes when all the news was cold, when it was no longer possible to take sides. In the meantime, she read hungrily: history, natural history, theology.