Two By Two Souls Fly

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[A] remarkable fantasy . . . Celestial Matters is an exhilarating book, alive with energy and the wonder of discovery. Admirers of hard sf, historical fiction and fantasy alike should check it out.

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Weird, disconcering, fascinating, and original

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[R]eflects favorably on his historical and folkloric scholarship . . . [a] literate, cerebral exploration . . . of the concept of altering history

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Two By Two Souls Fly

A Pastoral Fantasy

Richard Garfinkle

Published by Richard Garfinkle at Smashwords

Two By Two Souls Fly Copyright © 2011 by Richard Garfinkle. All rights reserved. This book may not be copied or reproduced, in whole or in part, by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise without written permission from the publisher except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any actual persons, events or localities is purely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author and publisher.

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Also by Richard Garfinkle at Smashwords:

Exaltations

Wayland's Principia

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. Preparatory

2. Wedding Day

3. Half a Moon’s Seclusion

4. Fill the Empty Spaces

5. First Breath

6. One to Go and One to Stay

7. Winter Dance

8. Pathways In

9. Teachings and Traditions

10. The Well Sweep

11. Sunderings and Joinings

12. Drum and Wind

13. Crossroads

14. Return to the Source

15. Passages Taken

16. Winding Tale: The Long Journey

Index of Tales, Riddles and Poems

About the Author

Introduction

There are tales told around the campfire, stories that excite bravery and admiration. They are sagas filled brimful with shouts and hisses, rages and fears. These stories, these epics tell the hearers what it is to be great and terrible. They warn the people how heroes and gods are in the ways of wrath and vengeance.

There are tales told around the hearthfire, stories of families and ancestors, of loves, marriages, births, and deaths. They are pastorals of sighs and whispers of laughter, joy and ache. These stories tell the hearers who they themselves are and where they came from, what their forebears did and why they to this day do what they do and live how they live.

This is a story of the second fire, a story of hearth and home. It begins where most romances end, upon a wedding day. It ends when it is told around the home fires.

The Second Riddle

The hero calls the gods but once:

To arm him for battle and bless his deeds with greatness.

The householder calls the gods ten thousand times:

To guide his life and bless his family with love.

Who then is closer to Heaven:

The hero in his epic?

Or the householder in his pastoral?

1. Preparatory

Marriage is a meeting of strangers. Yet romance, that dance of hearts and syncopation of joys, keeps these strangers from knowing how little they know each other until the time comes when they are joined. Thus was it wisely set down that on the night before wedding, the romantic trembling of fear and anticipation should be transformed by ritual and story into the needed seeing of the unknown other with whom new life would be made.

These two who were to be wed, Dominic and Serafina, the immigrant’s son and the native’s daughter, were brought to the temple in the village of Yrary and, for the last time in their lives, separated. When tomorrow came they would come forth in family, but for this one night they would be apart in space, time, and mythology. The couple who had known each other, had loved each other since Dominic’s father had come to the village bringing his four-year-old son and purchased with sword and spirit the farm adjoining Serafina’s home and family, would have for this brief eternal span no connection one to the other.

Within that emptiness, that lack of yet-joinedness, within the star-strewn openness of the sky, a spirit-as-yet-uncreated waited with untrammeled patience to exist. It had waited forever in the bosom of the All, nonexisting with all the other family spirits of clans as yet unfashioned. The not-yet-spirit had the perfect patience of the pre-existent melded with the need-for-being of the soon-born. From the star-swaddling robe of the All, the spirit gazed down upon the Earth, upon the nation of Hracza, upon the village of Yrary, upon the temple, upon the two whose space-between it would fill. Not yet real, the family spirit nestled in the nursery of those unborn, nurtured by the warm love thoughts of the affianced. The All caressed it with that mixture of love and sadness all parents feel when they contemplate the joys and sorrows existence will bring to their children.

Drink deep of romantic love, the All whispered to its newest child, but do not slake your thirst, for the drinks of youth are sweet, but lack nourishment. Better food will come, if you will wait past the hunger that is to follow.

The spirit-to-be obeyed, though it did not yet understand the words of the All.

***

Kneeling on the cold stone floor of the men’s side of the temple, Dominic’s eyes looked out upon a world limned by Serafina-light. His attentive gaze -- Attend, Dominic, the priest had commanded at the commencement of this knelt ordeal -- was supposed to be fixed on the basalt altar and its holy cargo. But Dominic did not see the oaken play-house of the gods, or the unglazed fired plate of Earth, or the rude straw hut of the village spirits. His loveblind/love-illuminated eyes would not see the loci of worship. He would not, could not attend to anything divine that was not his light-of-love, Serafina. His eyes and mind had sought reminders of her within the vigil space. He had looked around and around and finally focused upon the yellow flames of night candles that stood in man-high bronze holders behind the sacred stage.

The taper light was the color of Serafina’s hair; it fell gently upon him as her long unbound tresses did when they held each other. Year by year that cascade of light and concealment had grown, from the golden straw that covered her laughing eyes in childhood to the gleaming threads and sultry vines that framed the five thoughtful sides of her adult face.

Dominic’s heart filled with interlaced memories of Serafina’s hair, a tapestry of years embroidered with gilt-edged events, a young man’s lifetime woven from strands of a single moment. The leading edge of the still-growing tapestry held his mind, captivating him with thoughts of future joys. One moment stood bright in the lacework of his thoughts: the kiss they had shared before Priest and Priestess had separated them under the last orange rays of the passing day. Sunset they had kissed and her hair was so long that it shadowed both their faces even as it caught the light of sky and fire, dazzling his eyes.

Her hair -- the priestess would have cut it by now, just as the priest had shorn his beard -- Serafina’s hair lying close above her neck in the manner of all Hraczan brides. He had known Serafina since they were five years old and had never seen her hair as short as it would be now. A new way for him to see her; his heart leapt at the thought, Serafina in a new light, a renewed gift of love’s vision. There would be a new casting of her face and features, a showing forth of her neck and cheeks that had not been seen since before she came to womanhood.

Dominic thrilled at the thought of newness in Serafina’s appearance as he often thrilled at the newness of her subtle thoughts. What would it be like, that shortened treasury of gold? What would it be like to see the ocean-blue of her eyes without concealment? In Dominic’s mind the ocean was tied to her, though she had never seen such expansive waters. Because of Serafina’s eyes he remembered the boundless breadth of the northern sea clearly, though he had not seen it since his fourth year, the year he entered exile and came, though he knew it not, to joy. Sunlight and ocean bright he would see in the morning, see them both in Serafina at their wedding.

Joyous thoughts, nurturers of spirits, Dominic’s lustrous imaginations rose to the sky, quickening his family-to-be. Enlivened, given voice, the spirit-in-waiting announced its immanence across the gap of heaven and hearts. It jumped heedless from the embrace of the All and cried aloud, I will live in you and you in me.

As it fell toward Earth, it shouted again, I will live in you and you in me.

But that voice of family spoke into souls too fired with passion and too resounding with individual memory and idyll to heed its call. Lovers they were, not yet prepared to be a family. Unheard, the spirit-not-real fell away from the souls of the lovers. It would have fallen to the Realm of the Dead and joined the many loves that failed to live beyond romance, but four aged hands caught it and two determined voices drew it back to its birth-hearts with teachings and with stories.

In the starry throne above the world, the All nodded. Its work was being done by mortal hands and voices, as it had commanded in the early times of the world.

The All has blessed each of us with two souls, said a voice firmed by decades of authority.

Dominic sat up straight, guiltily shifting his gaze back to the altar. His neck became rigid as if his eyes and heart had never wavered from that devotional direction. To complete the image of attention, he clasped his hands over his bent knees; but a betraying flush rose in his cheeks. Dominic regretted then the loss of his beard.

Georgi, the village priest, walked through the door at Dominic’s right and made his way to the altar, stepping with careful deliberation across the winter-chilled floor. His practiced back bent smoothly as he bowed once before the play-house of the gods.

Georgi turned to look down at the kneeling bridegroom, his ice blue eyes meeting Dominic’s brown ones. Two souls: the body soul and the free soul. The All has blessed the free soul so that it may move wherever it wills, and has blessed the body soul so that it may become any place the free soul wills to move.

A lesson? On the night before his wedding? Dominic’s mind rebelled at the thought, stubborn against any turning from the straight path toward Serafina. Would he have to learn this lesson and understand it before they would let him marry her? Despair melted icicles onto the flames of Dominic’s ardor. Whenever the priestess Ludmilla had given her lectures to the young of the village, Dominic had knelt diligently, hoping to take in her words. But at the end of hours of talk his mind would emerge untouched by Ludmilla’s abstractions. The lists of attributes of the All, of the places of the gods of Heaven, of the duties of the gods of Earth, of the dangers that came to humanity from the Ills of the World, of the purposes of the five kinds of disciplined people, and of the esoteric meanings of the quests of heroes, all would vanish from his mind, a rising mist that left only dewdrops of unconnected words and ideas.

Ludmil . . . Dominic’s protest died on his lips. Georgi was the one speaking the accustomed words of his priestess-wife. And this was strange, stranger even than any other aspect of the night before his wedding. In all his life in Yrary, Dominic had never once heard the priest speak in abstractions. Georgi taught lessons of the everyday blessings of the gods of Heaven, of the wind and rain and the crops and the beasts and the seasons. He told stories of farmers, craftsmen, soldiers, and sailors meeting the gods of Earth or being assisted by the blessed dead or working under the guidance of the disciplined. Those lessons, those tales of how a proper life was to be lived and what divine assistance would come to one who forged a clan and lived such a life had taught Dominic all he thought he needed to know about the worlds above, below, and around him.

Georgi -- Dominic tried to muster words into a question, but his mind could not draw them together. He felt the lack of Serafina terribly. She of swift and clear thought had always helped him when his slower wits failed him. He reached across memory, hoping to touch her again as she had been when they had come to the temple together that eve.

They had entered the sacred precincts eager, walking properly but with a push to their gait that betrayed their desire for the night to be speedily over that the day of the wedding might come. They had entered like children before feasts and games and stories by the fire. Eager like lovers.

Parted like lovers. To the men’s side went the groom, to the women’s went the bride. Georgi’s hand upon Dominic’s shoulder had guided him down the center walk of the temple, then turned him left to the oaken door of the men’s side. The priest directed him with a sure and subtle pressure that reminded Dominic of the press of a rider’s legs guiding a horse and the push of the divine wind that directed the horseman.

The gods await within, Georgi had said as he gripped the heavy iron ring and pulled opened the door. His hand gave one last guiding press. Dominic had obeyed the touch and entered the sanctuary of men’s ceremonies.

Dominic had bowed as he turned rightwards to face the altar, his spreading arms offering supplication to whichever of the gods had been placed there. But the smooth movement of his sturdy form down, open, and around had stopped in wonder and bewilderment. The altar had been empty. None of the statuettes of the twenty gods of Heaven sat in the wooden playhouse that stood for the halls of the sky. Nor did any of the two hundred gods of Earth stand upon the ceramic plate that stood for the mortal world. Neither did the yearly-made and yearly-burned thatch hut that represented the village of Yrary hold a single one of the spirits of the town’s fifteen established clans, nor did it house the unfinished carving that would stand for the sixteenth clan to be made on the morrow.

When he had seen this divine desolation, Dominic had straightened up from his awkward stance and taken a few hesitant steps to reach the altar. Georgi had said the gods were waiting. The old priest would not lie about such a thing. Where were they, then? Was this a riddle? Some conundrum like, What gods are present when none are seen? Dominic hoped greatly that it was not. Riddles numbed his mind, though they opened and fired Serafina’s.

Perhaps they were both being presented with the same riddle. That would make Serafina happy. Dominic had imagined her, pacing around the altar, holding her fingers to her lips as she considered, her eyes, those blue-water eyes, darting here and there, seeking clues to the meaning, and her face coming to a glow in the moment just before she laughed with understanding. Dominic had imagined Serafina, and all else had faded from his mind.

And so Georgi had found him, two hours later, the groom’s mind on his love, not on the strange sight before him, nor on the family he was to make, the family that had almost fallen into nothingness because Dominic was comfortably drunk on the wine of romance.

The night before the wedding was not meant to be a comfortable one for the bride or the groom. The love that had brought them together, whether grown within them or dispensed from their families, had to undergo a sharp and bright transfiguration in sight of Heaven, Earth, and the people in the next day’s ceremony if they were to truly be wed, if their family was to be born.

Georgi cradled the spirit of that family in a sun-illumined bower crafted in his body soul by his well-practiced imagination. The breezes of Georgi’s thoughts whispered to the half-formed spirit of the rarity of its birth. You are to be more than just a family, you will be a new clan in our village. You will have within you men and women, gods and ancestors. Two peoples come together in you, two strangers meet to make a history and a nature all your own.

The spirit fed on the words and grew. Its eyes which had previously seen only the undifferentiated All now opened to Heaven, Earth, and the Realm of the Dead.

Georgi watched in awe at what was growing inside his body soul. In his long tenure as priest he had done many things for the village of Yrary. He and Ludmilla had called on the gods for blessings, had rooted out the Ills of the World, had counseled the people in joys and sorrows, had taught and learned. They had performed perhaps threescore weddings so that the clans might continue and carry the village forward.

In all of those weddings the family created had been joined to an existing clan. But such was not possible for the marriage of Dominic son of Horatio, the clanless son of the nationless stranger, alien son of an alien father who had lived among them but not been of them.

Dominic and Horatio had come into the country of Hracza fifteen years before from the newly-conquered Ryneland. The dark-haired man and his son had travelled from the east along the King’s Road and arrived in Yrary riding horses. Riding them! To the people of Hracza only noblemen and cavalry soldiers rode. But the man and the boy had not come with the commands of power or the musters of war. They had ridden in upon their Rynelander steeds, horses more beautiful, wiser, more swift than any Hraczan animal, tall and speedy steeds with ears peaked to catch the call of the wind upon which they might hear their god and ancestor.

The dress of man and boy was as strange as the manner of their coming. They did not wear the wool tunics and pants common to Hraczan men, but heavy shirts of leather painted with horses and boats, fish and waters, clouds and lightning, and they wore kilts which the Hraczan’s took for women’s skirts until they looked closely and saw lines of brass and iron rivets up and down the pleats. No Hraczan woman’s skirt was made to be armor. When the Rynelanders rode in company their kilts would clang against the riveted blankets of their horses to make a sound like thunder, a praise to their God and a warning to their enemies.

Dominic had sat upon his tall red horse without saying a word, his dark eyes saddened, a four-year-old child holding back the tears of dispossession.

His father had come down from his own grey steed setting foot on Hraczan soil, feeling it beneath him. Georgi remembered that Horatio’s hand had wavered toward the sword that hung firm at his right side, as if for a moment he felt himself still among the enemies of the long war. But the war had ended with the Ryneland king’s surrender. The enemy monarch had made himself the peaceful vassal of the Hraczan king, and with a mark of runes upon parchment had taken from his lords all their lands and power and given them to the conquerors.

My name is Horatio, the stranger had said. His speech was slow, for he did not know the language well, and the choice that he had made weighed heavily on him. I come to be a farmer.

Horatio had spoken to priest, priestess and the assembled clan chiefs. He had declared what he was: dispossessed nobility, his lands taken in the war. No longer proud of birth or station, he had come to the kingdom of the conqueror to give up the life of the nobleman and seek the life of the earth. He had heard that in Hracza families owned farms rather than living together on estates, so he had brought the last of his wealth with which to purchase some land. In the King’s Seat of Hracza he had been told that there was an empty steading in this village, this Yrary, and so had come to seek it.

Georgi remembered the words he had spoken to the tired-eyed stranger. The farmstead lies empty, but it cannot be bought with gold and silver. He who can clear the house of its ghosts, he who can reclaim it from the dead may live in it.

On a new moon night, bearing the relic-handled sword of his ancestors, Horatio had crossed the weed-infested fields, passed over the shattered stone of welcome, pushed open the split wooden door and entered the farmhouse of the long dead sixteenth clan. Alone he faced the family of body-soul ghosts who had died in a plague more than a hundred years past. They had not accepted the Realm of the Dead as their new home. Instead they remained upon the Earth and carried through mockeries of their living actions. They tilled the fields so that the land would grow nothing wholesome, they tended the flocks so the beasts grew sickly and skeletal, and they sought to meet with their neighbors who shunned them lest the unhallowed grave touch their clans as well.

Georgi and Ludmilla’s predecessors had tried to lay these haunts and remove the Ills of the World they brought with them, but they had failed. The ghosts had made a place for themselves in the village, had relied upon the bonds of land and kin to keep them on the Earth. They had bred the Ills of Sickness, Land-Blight, and Fear out of the very traditions of tending and clan-fellow-feeling that had made the village of Yrary. Only something untraditional, something new could displace them, for they had a right and a claim to their haunting.

Horatio’s sword, consecrated to the wind god of the Rynelanders, brought that cleansing newness. The power he had wrestled with as a nobleman drove the ghosts down to their proper place among the dead. At dawn Horatio had emerged carrying the broken hilt of his sword which he laid at the feet of Georgi and Ludmilla. Priest and priestess watched as the burden of the nobleman’s calling passed with wind swiftness from Horatio, leaving only a stain of power within his souls.

Now you may be a farmer, Ludmilla had said.

To the clans of the village Horatio gave gold and silver for grain and cattle, sheep, and a plow. For half a year, through autumn and winter, through the cold and the stone, he labored unaided by man or god to clear away decades of grave-given neglect. In all that time while the sun waned and the days grew dark and icy, his son watched, never speaking, never smiling or frowning, crying or laughing. Dominic’s face had been autumnal sad and wintry cold.

Spring came to the farm and Horatio planted his grain and grazed his small herds. Spring also brought a foal to the red horse Dominic had ridden. In a private ceremony attended only by the wind, Horatio and Dominic had named the brown foal Breath of Exile.

At the first full moon of the spring Georgi and Ludmilla walked from farm to farm, blessing the crops and the cattle and the sheep, blessing all. The farming gods of each clan took the bounty of heaven and spread it upon their fields and their herds, each according to the needs and ways of their clan.

Priest and priestess came last to the newcomer’s steading. They pronounced the blessing, drawing down the gifts of Heaven for the God of Earth named Farmer. The blessings fell like rain, infusing the ground with fertility, the animals with fecundity, blessing the well with life-giving water and the seeds with sustenance.

But there was no clan god to mediate the blessings, no divinity to moderate the endless giving of Heaven and Earth. The plants grew, but wildly, and the animals mated madly, passionately sloughing off their domesticity. Oxen became aurochs in their hearts and sheep recalled the glories of untended mountain life. Hard put was Horatio to tame them again. Only in two parts of the farm were the blessings received and apportioned with care. The horses were enlivened, but did not partake of the madness of the sheep and the kine, for the Ryneland God had come with them on the wind. The second place of proper reception was the well on the hill that overlooked the farmhouse. Quietly it accepted the infusions of Heaven without producing a water of drunkenness.

All through that first spring Horatio labored to retame his herds and guide the growth of his crops. The weeks-old horse he and the foal’s mother entrusted to his son’s care. Dominic received the obligation with five-year-old solemnity and his accustomed silence.

Each morning Dominic would walk beside Breath of Exile, leading him with gentle touch to a grassy field on the eastern edge of the farm. Border stones upon the ground marked the boundary that set them apart from their neighbors. In that field the horse would graze and Dominic would stroke its back and whisper in its ear. The only words the boy spoke in that time were to the horses.

A young girl from the neighboring farm would come and sit on one of the border stones, dangling her legs over the clean-cut side of the rock and watch boy and horse together, studying them with eyes intense and penetrating as the noonday sun.

For most of a moon she watched and wondered, but could not find the answer to the riddle that lodged in her heart. At the last her curiosity, emboldened by youthful impatience, overcame her and she spoke.

Are telling that horse a secret?

The question was so earnest and the need to know so intense that it pulled the answer out of Dominic. The sound of his own voice, sad and rough from long silence were painful both to speaker and listener. I’m telling him what it’s like to run on real ground.

Serafina jumped down from the rock, and as the young do who cannot contain the dancing spring of their lives, half walked, half ran across the field to Dominic. This is real ground, she said, pointing down to the earth beneath her small bare feet. It’s got dirt and rocks and hills and trees and grass. What’s not real about it?

It’s not open, Dominic said. The wind’s stopped by the hills and the trees. It doesn’t rush wherever it wants. And you can’t see to the end of the world. You can’t hear right. The rain falls too light; the grass is the wrong color; there’s too many trees. And you people aren’t right.

Dominic’s eyes welled with tears, and his voice choked in his throat. But Serafina would not let him fall back into silence.

Come on, she said, tugging gently on his arm. It’s all real. I’ll show you every part of here, you’ll see. Bring the horse if you want.

Dominic followed Serafina and Breath of Exile followed Dominic. The native led the strangers all over the village of Yrary, naming each place and each person so that Dominic and Breath of Exile would learn their new home, would learn this different rightness.

At sunset, Serafina brought Dominic to her own home and introduced him to her parents, Paolo and Lara.

Mother, Father, this is our neighbor’s boy, she said.

Paolo and Lara looked at the dark-haired boy with his smooth oval face and gangly limbs. At first they saw him as all the villagers did, a stranger in their midst. But their daughter’s pregnant exclamation that this was their neighbor’s son opened their thoughts and let them see a sad and lonely child.

Come and eat with us, Lara had said.

I have to take Breath of Exile back to my father, Dominic said, but the longing to stay was clear to all who heard him.

Paolo looked at Lara. I will take the boy and the horse home, he said. And come back with the boy and his father.

That night while Serafina taught Dominic the games of Yrary’s children and Dominic told Serafina about the land of his birth, Paolo and Horatio talked about farming, the native teaching the manners and ways of this land to the newcomer. The next morning Paolo and his sons came across the border to share Horatio’s labor in the way of neighbors.

The land was tilled, the cattle and sheep tended. Wheat grew in the fields and grapes upon the hillsides. By trade and breeding and training and the blessings of the wind the herd of horses grew and brought wealth to the farm, for the King’s army and the retainers of Hraczan nobles, knowing the superiority of Ryneland horses, purchased many of them. All of Horatio’s mortal strength went into the farm, so that after only ten years of exile he passed to the Realm of the Dead, his life exhausted by mortal battle, ghost-fight, and wild-taming labor. He died at less than twoscore years of age.

Yet he died leaving his son a farm that mostly worked and prospered, though the blessings still brought wildness and the steading was still empty of household gods. His last words were a blessing to his neighbors Paolo and Lara, for without their aid he would not have survived as long as he had, nor would he have created a right inheritance for Dominic.

When Horatio died, Dominic, born of one land and raised in another, felt as if he had lost all from his birth, as if he came from nowhere, a child of nothing. But Serafina would not let him discard his life. With her sharp mind she prodded him, asking him to teach her the language of the Ryneland, the names of his ancestors and their deeds, the stories of horses and horsemen. Most of all she sought to know the riddles of the sailors who took ship upon the northern sea called the Whale Road and came back from their journeys laden with treasure, spices, and lore.

Serafina would not let Dominic forget, or shut away his past. By riddles and questions, by implorings and lessons she made her way deep into his heart. And he in turn entered hers, so that when the three years of mourning had passed, when Dominic entered his seventeenth year and Serafina her sixteenth, they found themselves one in soul and love.

Paolo and Lara happily consented when they asked to be wed, though many villagers clucked their tongues at the idea of marriage to the stranger’s son. Indeed, the chiefs of seven clans came to the priest and priestess and asked them to refuse permission. What Georgi and Ludmilla replied was never repeated, but for weeks thereafter those clan chiefs had not dared to look either priest or priestess in the eyes.

Yet the day after that delegation was sent away in shamed disappointment Dominic and Serafina had been summoned to the temple. They went with heads bowed, holding each the other’s hand tightly for fear that their hopes would be undone.

I have spoken to the chiefs of the clans, Georgi said. His eyes looked baleful but there was a smile upon his lips. The words I said to them are not for ears as tender as yours. But, in simple, I told them that whether you wed or not is no concern of theirs.

The young lovers’ hearts were lightened, but before they could thank the priest Ludmilla spoke, and her voice was sad and filled with the compassion of one who must injure the hopes of a beloved child.

Yet there is a true difficulty that must be overcome before you may marry, she said. That is the ill of Dominic’s clanlessness.

Ludmilla laid out the paradox of their situation. Dominic was not of any of the fifteen clans. That in itself was a minor problem. Outsiders had married into the clans before, and Serafina’s family would have accepted him happily; many of their marriages were made to people from other villages. But Dominic’s farmstead had been properly won and properly consecrated as a separate hearth and home. By his deeds and his labor Horatio had made a new place for his son, a place that could not be given to another clan.

You have three choices, Ludmilla said. First, do not marry. She waited through the inevitable refusal. Second, abandon the farm your father made for you and marry into Serafina’s clan. Or third, make a new clan for yourselves.

A new clan, they said without hesitation.

It will not be easy, Georgi said. Love alone will not suffice for all that you must do. There will be labor of spirit such as neither of you has ever attempted.

For a time neither Dominic nor Serafina spoke, neither wanting to commit the other to a hard course. But their hearts were too close for there to be any other choice.

At last Dominic broke silence. Tell us what we must do and we will do it.

However difficult it is, Serafina said.

I will show you, Georgi said. From behind the central altar in the temple’s heart he brought a piece of uncarved ashwood half as long as his arm. It was rough and knotted, the bark of the tree clinging to it.

If you saw this in the woods would you pick it up? he asked Dominic.

Dominic shook his head. It’s too short for a staff, too gnarled to put in a wall, and too green for firewood.

And too dull to be kept for its beauty, Serafina said.

This is your clan, Georgi said. If you wed today, this is how Heaven would look upon you, as neither useful nor beautiful enough to be picked up and hallowed. By the time you are wed, your family must catch the eyes of the gods so they will reach down and bless you. And by the time you die, your clan must be both useful and beautiful to divinity and humanity if your family is to survive beyond one generation.

Dominic and Serafina stared at the ill-favored log.

What do we do first? Dominic asked.

Georgi went back behind the altar and emerged carrying a short steel knife with a bone handle carved in the shape of a clutching hand. With great care, the priest put the knife against the log and stripped away a lath of bark, beneath which lay good wood waiting to be carved.

Dominic and Serafina, Georgi and Ludmilla, man and woman, priest and priestess labored for two years in the stripping of bark. They cleared the farm of the remnants of old blessings and curses, digging up charms from the fields, planing down the runes that the former clan had carved into the hearth stones. They cleansed the farmhouse with fire, water, air, and earth. They sang chants in old tongues to send the old to the Realm of the Dead and to ask the All to prepare the new to live upon the Earth.

During that time no one had lived in the farmhouse. Dominic stayed with Serafina’s family, being careful in how intimate he became, for Georgi warned him to be neither as distant as a guest nor as close as a family member.

Each morning Dominic would get up and, accompanied by Serafina’s father and three brothers, would work both farms, tending to crops, cattle, sheep, and horses -- especially the horses. Dominic was mindful of his father’s legacy and would each day tend and train the small herd of praiseworthy beasts that roamed his land. In the stable he would speak to the red mare and through her to the Wind God of his ancestors. He would draw down their help, but he could not, though the Wind God asked, give the land to that divinity. If the steading Horatio had made were to be turned fully over to the Ryneland god it would cease to be part of Yrary village and he would lose Serafina. Dominic knew that this would be the hardest part of the coming together. A place would have to be found for his god alongside the Hraczan gods. All through the cleansing he looked for such a place, but could not yet find it.

On a bright autumn day when all trace of old charms, old bones, and old clan gods were gone from Dominic’s farmstead, Georgi brought forth the ashwood, now clean of bark and knots, and held it up to the noonday sun. Light played upon it, showing the variations in grain and color, hinting at the form that lay beneath. It waited only hands skilled and blessed to be released. It was beautiful and utile.

Now you will wed, said Ludmilla.

A moon later their pre-nuptial bonfire was lit and the people of Yrary young and old came to sing and dance, and those with skill or traditional claim came to play upon pipes and drums and the hurdey-gurdey. There had been an eating of honey cakes and a drinking of cider pressed from the first apples of autumn, for wine would not be drunk until the wedding itself.

To Dominic and Serafina the party had been a delight. Their eyes only for each other, they did not notice that the elders of most of the clans were quiet in the celebrations and reserved in their dance and drink. The couple saw not, joying in the time to come, and eagerly going to the temple with the priest and priestess for the final hours of preparation.

As they were led up the path, the voices of some married folk of the village carried to them through the night air. Fare well, good fortune. Listen close, Serafina, think hard, Dominic. The ordeal is only one night. Remember what you hear and say. Remember love. Remember each other.

And one voice ringing above the others, the deep sound of Serafina’s eldest brother, Ivan, himself married but a few years past. When they come back, remember to ask questions.

Georgi had come back to the men’s side, had jolted Dominic from his reverie, had with sternness recalled the voice of Ivan.

Georgi? Dominic asked hesitantly. May I ask a question?

Yes, Dominic. Georgi’s tone was even, but there was a hint of thunder-rumble in his lungs, as if lightning might fall at any moment.

You said the gods were waiting for me, but the altar’s deserted. Dominic’s gaze returned to the three barren places on the sacral stone, the spaces of Heaven, Earth, and the village desolate and forlorn. Their terrible vacancy, now clearly seen for the first time, burrowed into his body soul and dragged forth memories of childhood, the loss upon loss of his aching youth. He remembered his mother’s and sister’s deaths, the last view he had of his family steading, the last time he had heard