“You. Your ancestors.”

“But that is a long time ago.” Her tone was near despair. “I am not old.”

“I’m sorry. I’m explaining so badly. I’m trying to explain why those people were attacking you tonight.

Why the people hate you.”

“Why do they hate us?” asked the woman.

“Because you are different. And . . . other reasons too. Let me tell you another story, this one from not so long ago. Maybe some of you were there.” Abu paused and let the dark illuminate for him another set of pictures, the lines and colors crude and childish, for he had been a child at the time. Antinomials attack the mail. Portraits of atheists: children. Portraits of atheists: mother. Riders in the snow. The cannibal’s dance. And he told them how in the last phase of winter, when he was just a schoolboy, an armed band of antinomials, led by a tall man with only one hand, had come down from the far north to loot the farmers in that district. They had stolen horses and murdered livestock, and for more than a month they had terrorized the people there, killing policemen, taking prisoners, burning farms, and stealing food. The bishop sent an army, which chased them to a mountain north of Gaur. They had a fortress there and made a desperate defense, but the general was in no hurry. He surrounded them and starved them out, but hundreds of days later when the walls were down and they were overwhelmed, he found that they had kept themselves alive by eating the bodies of their prisoners, and their brothers and sisters who had died fighting.

There was silence again, and out of the dark came the same woman’s voice, desolate and low. “I think there is no hope for me but death. I cannot understand these stories. I never . . . heard them before.

What are antinomials?”

Prince Abu sighed. “You,” he said. “People without names. Atheists. Cannibals. You have no God.”

“And what is . . . what is God?”

* * *

“Sweet God,” prayed the bishop. At six o’clock the sun rose, white and heavy on the white horizon. The bishop had been up all night. “ ‘Sweet love,’ ” she quoted happily. “ ‘How sweet it is to watch you sleep, your body like an unstrung bow, unstrung by loving hands.’ ” The festival had exhausted her, but the worst was over, and she had been left alone in the aromatic gardens of the temple to watch the sun rise over the rooftops of her city. Around her, sparkwood, dogwood, black magnolias, suntrumpets shot their seed over the careful borders of the lawn; as she sat on the grass next to the fountain, streamers of flowers fell around her. It was the only garden for 300 miles, the only grass, the only flowers, the only living trees.

“Sweet God,” she thought, and she turned her head and listened for His footsteps in the garden, where Angkhdt himself had lived and worked, and tropical flowers grew miraculously in the open air, no matter what the season. She had seen an orchid open to the snow. “Sweet God,” she thought, “are you still with me?” because inevitably ceremonies and festivals—candles, solemn fat old men, the clustered spirit of a million true believers—would pack into a mass so ponderous that it could crush a stronger thing than God. At night the bells, the chanting, the suffocating ritual would frighten Him away, and she was never sure He would return. Every morning she sat alone, waiting in the garden for His timid step.