sun. It rested straight overhead; lack of shadows lent the glare a cast of emptiness. The multitude fell silent, staring from their altar to his. Each of their eyes resembled a pearl set with an onyx.
The solitary man beckoned downslope, and several more men began toiling upward with waterskins and earthen jars. One by one, they emptied their vessels over the heaped altar. Gathering in great, glistering drops, the clear fluid oozed down from fiber to crimson fiber of the raw meat, stone to bloodstained stone, until it filled a trench dug deep around the altar.
“Where have they found so much water,” Felipe marveled, “in the midst of a desperate drought?”
“Cannot people always provide for their ceremonials?” Raymonde replied. “Though it may mean robbing themselves and their children of food, water, and even truth.”
“Now!” cried the solitary man. “Choose, O my people, which you will serve—Lord or the Lord!”
He threw wide his arms, gesturing toward both altars at once. For an instant, his open palm hovered almost directly above his own offering. Even as he jerked it back, fire sprang out upon the surface of the meat, scorching it until it writhed like something alive, shimmering down the stones, sheathing the whole erection in dancing flame. When it reached the trough, it rose in an eager crimson ring to circle altar, offering, and all.
“Was it water,” said Felipe, “or was it oil?”
“Beware, great-great-grandson,” Raymonde murmured. “One must always look upon these things with the eyes of Faith.”
How he heard her words, Felipe was not sure, for a huge shout had risen from the mob as it surged up the left-hand hill to lay hold on the outermost priests, who offered no resistance.
The next thing Felipe knew, he stood with his guide on one side of the nearly dry brook they had crossed earlier. On the other side, the defeated priests stood, weary and disheartened but meekly proud, waiting in a long, long line that stretched from horizon to horizon. No; it did not: far to the east, it ended abruptly.
The trickle of water increased. The streambed began to fill, flowing red. Don Felipe looked again to the east. The end of the line was much nearer now—the solitary man of the consummated altar was progressing westward. Before him, the priests stood still. Behind him, they lay motionless across the streambed. He held a bloody sword in his right hand, and his garments dripped heavy with blood. One by one, he was cutting their throats.
He reached those almost immediately facing Felipe and Raymonde. So far, none of the defeated priests had offered any protest; but now one, a beardless youth, perhaps an acolyte, raised face and voice to the heavens, crying, “O Lord, O Lord, why have You forsaken us?”
The solitary man cut the youth down and moved on. At Felipe’s feet, the brown grasses grew lush and green as they greedily lapped the torrent of blood.
“But what choice was this?” Felipe protested. “The Lord or the Lord?”
“Heirs of the prophet-inquisitor will translate the one title and not the other,” she explained, “but ‘Baal’ means ‘Lord.’”
“Then…have I been deceived? How is this possible?”
“When I was in the flesh,” Raymonde said musingly, “I believed that this Lord of the Old Testament was hard and cruel because He had not yet learned compassion by passing through the Virgin’s womb, by tasting for Himself the full measure of human pain through enduring the torture of the cross.”
Felipe stared at her in horror. “Can this be? My own ancestress a heretic?”
With a sad smile, she brushed her martyr’s palm across his sleeve. “All flesh is weak and liable to error.”
Catching his arm away as if it had been burned, he stared at her for one heartbeat, then turned and fled.
The bloodsoaked dust sucked at his ankles, yet still he ran—though no one pursued—ran like a rabbit from the hounds. A line of pointy forest stretched between him and the distant horizon. If he could reach those firs, he might be safe…
He had reached them. He stood beneath them, panting, leaning heavily against the rough bark of the nearest tree, feeling his heart thud within his chest, wondering vaguely why he had run. Did the nightmare arise from the slaughter of hundreds of pagan priests, or from the revelation of his ancestress as martyred heretic?
Something fell on his shoulder. Raymonde’s hand? But this touch was firm, far from gentle. He whirled around, to behold a homely and hard-faced woman who stood tall as a man and wore trousers like a man. For a time he wondered if she were a man. Even for a man, she would have been tall; but her long nose, strong chin, and hollow cheeks would not have appeared unhandsome.
“Call me Rosemary, grandfather,” she told him. “Now come on.” Gesturing for him to follow, she turned and started walking deeper into the woods.
Still numb, repeating an Ave in his mind, he followed.
The forest thickened, then thinned. Suddenly they stood at its edge, between two of the outermost trees, facing a field of herbs and gravel. Across the field, a stone church, seen from the back, blocked Felipe’s view of whatever lay beyond. The shadow of its spire and cross, falling backward over the slate roof, pointed to a row of pits. How large they were he could not quite judge, but that they were freshly dug he guessed by their sharp lines and the darkness of the clods heaped up between them.
A strange machine appeared with a dull, roaring noise, sped fast as a running cat to the corner of the church, and lurched to a stop just short of the building. This machine looked like some strange and immense wagon, covered over with walls of dull-painted metal and resting on wheels that appeared to be encased in black cloth almost as stiff as wax. Yet it had moved with neither oxen, horses, nor any other creatures to pull it, but with only a little bump or proturberance at its front, windowed after the manner of certain watchtowers.
“What thing is that?” Felipe asked, coughing at an acrid stench that might have been its breath.
“We call it a truck.”
Out of the church came men dressed in close-fitting black. Each bore strapped near his waist a small leather sheath curiously bulky in shape, and most of them also carried long, thin rods with paddle-like swellings at one end. All these men wore on one sleeve a band marked with a vivid gamma-cross.
The back end of the truck opened into a pair of doors, spreading like the wings of a beetle, and people filed out…an endless procession of people, men and women, children, youths, and grown folk in the pride of their strength, babes in arms and elders hobbling upon canes, all clad in strange garments: the women in gowns of many colors and little fabric, barely covering their knees; the men mostly in trousers and doublets stark in cut and somber in hue. Several of the men wore their hair in locks much like those the laws of Felipe’s own time had come to prescribe for Israelites.
A very few people came naked from the truck. The rest paused and stripped themselves to the skin, helping the very old and very young where necessary, dropping the garments into piles. Two men armbanded with gamma-crosses emerged from the windowed front of the truck and began gathering up the piles of discarded garments, loading them back into the truck. The naked people, shivering a little in the chill morning wind, filed to the edges of the pits.
The black-clad men lifted their rods, each placing the paddle end against one shoulder and pointing the narrow end
