thers. He suppressed a grin, but not his surprise: the shepherd was disconcertingly perceptive.
Menico's first price was immediately accepted by Tomasso d'Astibar bar Sandre, confirming in Devin's mind what a sorry creature he was to bear such a magnificent name and lineage.
It would have interested him, and led him a step or two further down the head road towards maturity, to learn that Duke Sandre himself would have accepted the same price, or twice as much, and in exactly the same manner. Devin was not quite twenty though, and even Menico, three times his age, would loudly curse himself back at the inn amid the celebratory wine for not having quoted even more than the extortionate sum he had just received in full.
Only Eghano, aged and placid, softly drumming two wooden spoons on their trestle table, said, "Leave well enough. We need not hold out a greedy palm. There will be more of these from now on. If you are wise you'll leave a tithe at each of the temples tomorrow. We will earn it back with interest when they choose musicians for the Ember Days."
Menico, in high good humor, swore even more magnificently than before, and announced a set intention to offer Eghano's wrinkled body as a tithe to the fleshy priest of Morian instead. Eghano smiled toothlessly and continued his soft drumming.
Menico ordered them all to bed not long after the evening meal. They'd have an early start tomorrow, pointing towards the most important performance of their lives. He beamed benevolently as Aldine led Nieri from the room. The girls would share a bed that night Devin was sure, and for the first time, he suspected. He wished them joy of each other, knowing that they had come together magically as dancers that afternoon and also knowing, for it had happened to him once, how that could spill over into the candles of a late night in bed.
He looked around for Catriana but she had gone upstairs already. She'd kissed him briefly on the cheek though, right after Menico's fierce embrace back in the Sandreni Palace. It was a start; it might be a start.
He bade good night to the others and went up to the single room that was the one luxury he'd demanded of Menico's tour budget after Marra had died.
He expected to dream of her, because of the mourning rites, because of unslaked desire, because he dreamt of her most nights. Instead he had a vision of the god.
He saw Adaon on the mountainside in Tregea, naked and magnificent. He saw him torn apart in frenzy and in flowing blood by his priestesses, suborned by their womanhood for this one autumn morning of every turning year to the deeper service of their sex. Shredding the flesh of the dying god in the service of the two goddesses who loved him and who shared him as mother, daughter, sister, bride, all through the year and through all the years since Eanna named the stars.↘↘網↘
Shared him and loved him except on this one morning in the falling season. This morning that was shaped to become the harbinger, the promise of spring to come, of winter's end. This one single morning on the mountain when the god who was a man had to be slain. Torn and slain, to be put into his place which was the earth. To become the soil, which would be nurtured in turn by the rain of Eanna's tears and the moist sorrowings of Morian's endless underground streams twisting in their need. Slain to be reborn and so loved anew, more and more with each passing year, with each and every time of dying on these cypress-clad heights. Slain to be lamented and then to rise as a god rises, as a man does, as the wheat of summer fields. To rise and then lie down with the goddesses, with his mother and his bride, his sister and his daughter, with Eanna and Morian under sun and stars and the circling moons, the blue one and the silver.
Devin dreamt, terribly, that primal scene of women running on the mountainside, their long hair streaming behind them as they pursued the man-god to that high chasm above the torrent of Casadel.
He saw th