The walls of her room were frescoed with images of plants and monsters, as if the pages of the bestiary had been ripped out and shuffled with pages from the Jara Floriary and then pasted to the wall. At first she thought that she was looking at her own drawings, and then she realized that these had been painted by another. She moved in and out of consciousness in the manner of waves advancing and retreating across a beach. She would feel herself roll towards wakefulness, her eyes would flutter open, and she would see mandibles and carapaces on the ceiling above her, and imagine that her wave was full of pinching, biting creatures that belonged somewhere else, back in the depths of unconsciousness that the wave receded into. Sleep again. So much sleep that her body seemed to exude the excess, to send it into the atmosphere of the room, so that the drum owl and the memory gull and the tiger swan were lulled to sleep as well. They must be asleep, as their painted forms never moved.


    There had been strange birds, that danced, that made a face with their wings. They weren’t on the wall, and when she came to consciousness she clung to this fact, as if it were a sodden log, and she didn’t quite go to sleep again. She was awake enough that when the woman in the winged head dress came into her room to feed her, she held the three spoonfuls of soup in her mouth, and when the woman left she spit them out onto the pillow beside her head. The sound of three thumps had proceeded the woman into the room. They always proceeded the woman. And as Manrie’s mind tightened and dried, she realized that it was the sound of bolts being pushed back. Three bolts, on the outside of the door.


    Her body hurt, but then she decided that it was just the usual ache of having a body. The soup had removed it, had made her forget that she had arms and legs and a head that was heavy and a back that was tight with inaction. She decided to teach her vertebrae how to move again. There was a painting to the left of her bed. A caterpillar. *Yes, little caterpillar*, she thought, *come and crawl upon my back.* She felt it there, crawling, as if it were crawling along the windowsill. The windowsill! There was a windowsill just to the right of the caterpillar. Therefore there must be a window. Which was why she could see the room. It was daytime. And if it was daytime, and there was a window, she could go to it and see where she was.


    She stood at the window, which was open, but the ground was very far below. She was naked, which felt like a victory, because an autumnal breeze was blowing and it awakened her flesh. It blew over fields below, and there were people working in them. There were other buildings, and each building was surrounded by fields, as if the fields were skirts that the buildings were wearing, fanned out as they squatted on the ground. The fields ended at raw cliffs in all three directions that she could see from her window. A valley, then. The cliffs were very high, but if she tilted her head she could see trees scraping the sky along their heights. There was a roaring sound, the sound of the ocean she had floated on as she slept. Or maybe the roaring of one of the creatures on the walls. But no. There was no ocean, and the creatures were merely paintings. It sounded like a waterfall, but she couldn’t see a waterfall, so it must be somewhere behind her.


    She stood there watching, observing the people going back and forth. Some of them were wearing the odd, winged head dresses. White, with pleated folds stretched out to either side. Like a thick sheet that had been frozen as it was shaken out. She couldn’t see their faces, and thought, for a while, that they didn’t have any. Then she realized that they must be veiled. They worked the fields, squatting, harvesting, turning the earth. The fields looked ripe, an amazing yield of cabbages and beans and very red tomatoes.


    Other people passed back and forth, men and women in tapestried robes. She couldn’t see the designs, but somehow she thought that they were wearing the paintings that were on the walls of her room. Which was odd, because they had been wearing normal robes when they found her and Taeyaho beside the lake. Taeyaho! He flashed back into existence. She remembered. The men had lifted the tree away, and there had been a branch in Taeyaho’s side. There had been a little man, quite quick and agile with his hands, and a big, careful man who seemed very clean despite the rain and mud, and four or five others, and the mushroom man, watching all of them and giving orders. The rain had ended and she had sat by a fire as they bandaged Taeyaho, and the little man had winked at her, and winked again, and gone on winking, until she realized that he had a tic. He told her that Taeyaho would live. Then they had fed her soup, just like the soup that the woman who came into her room gave her, and she had gone to sleep.


    She remembered words, spoken a lifetime ago. “Will its effects be like the kealorea that we smoked yesterday?” And a voice, answering. “Much different. The kealoria produces a sense of euphoria. The betzazarra lifts one into the realm of dream. You will leave your body and walk where you will.” She turned from the window and went to the bed. The spit-up soup was yellow. She sniffed at it. But she couldn’t remember what the betzazarra had smelled like, only that it had made distance and time strange, and caused Aizdha to fall to his death. There was no place to hide the pillow. No way to explain its absence if she did. She turned it over to hide the mess.


    Then she went back to the window and watched the people come and go. She didn’t see the mushroom man, but she did see the big, careful man from the lakeside. He emerged from a tall building and walked right under her window. His head was bare and she could see that he was balding. He walked quickly, but he seemed aware of each step, as if his mind were focused on nothing but the movement of his body. His robes were plain. Green and brown. Like a patch of forest. He went past her building and disappeared.


    Dusk came as she was examining the frescoes in her room. They were all rather common creatures, although some of the plants were unknown to her. As the sun set there was a great cawing, and she rushed back to the window. Birds were lifting from the tops of the cliffs and skirling away into the sky. Very large birds. The setting sun caught against blue wings, as if they were shards of the daytime sky, flying to some hidden perch beyond the veneer of night. Gorpsarra. The mushroom man had been lifted into the sky by a gorpsarra, when he was a boy.


    In the morning, the woman in the head dress returned, and fed her soup. She held it in her mouth and when the woman had gone she went to the window and spit it out. But she wasn’t careful enough. There was a cry from below. She ran back to the bed and pretended to sleep as the three bolts went back on the door. Footsteps across the floor, and hands grabbed her head and lifted it, turning it back and forth. Other hands felt along the bedsheets, then turned the pillow. “As I thought,” a voice said. “She is guilty of the First Disobedience of the Will. I will go and fetch Karkriesha. You stay here and watch her.”


    Indistinct sounds, then the scrape of a chair being dragged into the room. Which meant that the door was open. Manrie peered through slit eyelids. The woman in the white head dress was settling down onto the chair, blocking the exit with her body. Manrie closed her eyes just as the woman turned her head towards her. The sound of paper shuffling.


    “I know that you’re awake. No matter. A chance for me to read to you. Wasted time is a victory for the land.” This said with the pert complacency of an aphorism. Whose aphorism, though? It wasn’t a saying that Manrie had ever heard before.


    The woman rustled the paper as if it were a bell that she was ringing at the beginning of a ritual. “From the Scrupulous Canons, Fourth Book of Tenets. ‘A blade of grass is not a blade of grass until we make it a blade of grass. An olive tree is not an olive tree until we make it an olive tree. A bean is not a bean until we make it a bean. Rye is not grain until we make it grain. Wheat is not grain until we make it grain. Corn is not grain until we make it grain. Rice is not grain until we make it grain. A plum is not a fruit until we make it a fruit…’”


    It went on. Plants listed. Then animals. “A pig is not a pig until we make it a pig. A cow is not a cow until we make it a cow.” On and on. Her voice was toneless, dry. It lulled Manrie, as if the words had become a drug. She didn’t bother to think that it was nonsense. She didn’t bother to engage with it at all. She slit open her eyes and regarded the woman. She was big, and she had big hands, sheathed in red gloves, the color meant to turn them into a threat. Manrie didn’t think she could get past her. If she did, where would she go? Better to make her escape when she had more knowledge of her surroundings. And after she had found Taeyaho.


    The recitation changed, like the wind shifting. The words were much the same, but blown from a different direction. “Lokeyn said, ‘If we meet an aurochs, and we train an aurochs, and we milk an aurochs, and we build a paddock for an aurochs, and we build a barn for an aurochs, and we mate the aurochs with a fine bull, and we mate the calves that are most complacent when they are grown, and we continue down through many generations, and we create a cow, one morning we will come into the barn, and the land will have infested the cow, and the aurochs will look through its eyes, and it will gore us or refuse to give milk or kick out the boards of its stable and go to run wild through the woods. If we find a wild grain, and we grow that wild grain, and we throw away the tough stalks, and we keep the tender stalks, and we invite the bees and flies to the field, and we grow more grain, and we throw away the tough stalks, and we keep the tender stalks, until that grain is soft and sweet and gives joy to the tongue, one morning we will go to make bread, and the grain won’t grind, and it will blow up in our stomaches, and we will be crippled with pain, as the land will have infested the grain, and we will starve again. If we find a wild bird…”


    Her voice continued, but Manrie, in her wandering thoughts, had been taken back to her childhood, to the caravan that she and her mother joined, full of starving people. Because the land had ceased to yield its fruit. Again she remembered the mushroom man, and it was as if his voice were speaking in the room. “When I was a child, a great plague came upon my village. It was as if the air itself had turned to poison. The farmers reported that the ground had turned yellowish in patches, out in the fields. Like moss growing on a tree, only the color of a seeping wound, and pungent.” Another famine, years before she was born. The land hates us, he had said. We must tame the land. We must make it a slave.


    She thought of Uku. Had he and Tafaemi died in the lake? She could not imagine Uku dying. Perhaps he was here, in some other room of this strange house. Perhaps some woman with white wings on her head was reading to him in a dull voice at just this moment. She imagined him looming in the doorway. She imagined him picking up the woman in her chair and carrying her to the window and throwing her out.


    Someone did appear in the doorway, but it wasn’t the giant. It was another woman, whose white head dress had even more pleats, as if the birds that the head dresses were meant to imitate were becoming more palsied with each iteration. Poor birds, so bent in on themselves. But the birds that had danced in the bowl in the mountain had wings like that. Collapsible. Oddly hidden in their fat bodies.


    The reading woman was standing up and moving her chair aside. She slipped her sheath of papers back into her sleeve, her red gloves like agile wounds. The newcomer walked past her and paused at Manrie’s bedside and gazed down at her. She tutted. “Not even pretending to sleep.” She had a very high voice, unnatural, as if a little girl was speaking through her. “Never mind. Poor dear. You were so injured when they found you. They saved your life, you know.”


    “I don’t remember being injured.”


    “Still in the First Realm of Knowing, I see. But I give you the gift of the First Step Along the Road to All Knowing. Not all injuries are of the body. Retoebaeni saw a grievous wound, deep beneath your mind and actions. Of course he did. So he offered you the Happy Rest of First Healing.”


    “Who’s Retoebaeni?”


    “Why, you’ve met him. Don’t you remember? He sewed up your friend, so that he could live. There are many life-givers in our community. Retoebaeni stands above them all. He is much greater than my poor self.” She made the mistake of following this statement with a titter, and Manrie could tell that she didn’t believe a word of it.


    “Taeyaho. Where is Taeyaho?”


    “That sweet boy! He is resting, as you were. But lie back. Allow me to assess you. If your will has awoken to Disobedience, it is be time to begin the Healing of the First Knowing.”


    “What’s that?”


    “The beginning of wisdom, sweet little love. The beginning of wisdom. I know, I know. Graecelle has been presumptive in your catechism. Don’t deny it, Graecelle, I heard you as I came up the stairs. You were reading aloud from the Fourth Book of Tenets. I’m afraid that is a mark of guilt for you, my dear. You are guilty of the Seventh Disobedience of Pride. I will have to tell the Master. But no matter. Your purgation won’t be strenuous.”


    “Yes, Karkriesha,” the other woman said. She had reseated herself in her chair. A little smile was playing around her mouth, as if she were enjoying being chastised, and would enjoy her purgation, whatever that was.


    Manrie had lived among scholars. She knew how strange words and phrases could be turned into a secret language, how they could be used to prove belonging and confuse outsiders. She refused to be mystified. “I’d like to see Taeyaho.”


    “Yes, of course. But first, my assessment. Lie back, lie back. There we are. Now breathe slowly.” The woman didn’t touch her, but began to run her hands through the air over her body. Her head dress flapped about her face. Her brown skin was very smooth and shiny, and a cloud of golden hair floated from beneath the head dress. She looked like an egg that had been cracked and somehow contained a stone, rather than a yolk. From time to time the hands would pause and the woman would twist her fingers into odd positions. When she was finished, she lifted her hands and clasped them to her chest, like a young girl delighted by a present. “Oh, yes,” she breathed. “Oh, yes. You will be quite useful to the Master.”


    Manrie kept her expression blank. Of course she’d be useful to the master, if the master was who she thought he was. She had been Aizdha’s assistant, after all. “Who is the Master?” she asked innocently.


    “Oh, he is marvelous,” Karkriesha said. “I have not starved once. Not for seven years!”


    The women went away again, and the door was bolted. But an hour later it was reopened and a girl came in, carrying a tray that contained brown bread and butter and a leg of mutton and some very lovely cooked squash. Manrie was ravenous. The girl sat on the edge of her bed and watched her eat with a serious expression. The door was left open behind her.


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    “What’s your name?” Manrie asked, wiping grease from her face with the bed sheet.


    “They call me Pumpkin.”


    “You don’t have a real name?”


    “I will receive one. When I’m older.”


    “Well, Pumpkin, why are you watching me eat?”


    “I am to report on your appetite.”


    “Report to whom?”


    “Karkriesha, of course.”


    “She’s in charge here?”


    “She runs the infirmary.”


    “Who runs everything else?”


    The girl seemed to misunderstand. “Naiklora is the Field Mistress. Taeslahbin is the scout. Braelmith was the scout, but he was killed by a rinchonyan. Retoebaeni is the alchemist. Slohrta is the carpenter. Her husband was the carpenter, but he was guilty of the Fourth Disobedience of Hopelessness. Haelkiz is the weaver. Parahti is the potter. Wiltruen is the tanner…”


    “Enough. I won’t be able to remember all of those names. How many people live here?”


    The girl scrunched up her face. “If I tell you, you will be guilty of the First Disobedience of the Curious.”


    “Is it wrong to be curious?”


    “Not wrong. But it’s a disobedience. Unless you become a Master of the Canons. Then you can be curious about everything.”


    “Are you a Master of the Canons?”


    Pumpkin made a face, to show Manrie that she was being ridiculous. “I am a child. But none of the purgations for children are that bad. We’re not really guilty of a disobedience until we’ve learned the Children’s Catechism.”


    “What purgation will I get, if I’m curious?”


    “If you’re guilty of the First Disobedience of the Curious,” Pumpkin corrected, as if there were a panoply of disobediences, and you had to be specific, “you would be given the Purgation of the Cliffside. I think it’s much scarier than the Purgation of the Fields. At least in the fields, you’re with someone you know.”


    “What is a purgation like? What do you have to do?”


    The girl frowned. “How would I know? We don’t talk about the purgations.”


    “But you know what they are.”


    The frown deepened. “I know *where* they are.”


    Manrie let that pass. “There are many masters, then?”


    “Well, there are masters, and there’s The Master. He was the first master. The Master of Masters, I guess.”


    “And who is Lokeyn?”


    The girl stared at her. “He’s dead,” she said.


    “But he wrote the book?”


    “What book?”


    “The one about grass not being grass.”


    The girl didn’t know what she was talking about, but wanted to pretend that she did. Which made her guilty of the First Disobedience of Hubris, Manrie supposed. Although maybe hubris was a good thing, according to the way these people saw the world. Manrie finished eating and pushed the tray aside. “I want to explore,” she said.


    “Yes, you’re supposed to.”


    “I’m supposed to?”


    “Oh, yes. You must familiarize yourself with the Infirmary. I’m supposed to guide you.”


    “I seem to be naked.”


    “That’s all right. We’re all naked at birth.”


    “But I was born a long time ago.”


    “No you weren’t. This is your birth. You’re being born now. But if you like, I can get swaddling.”


    “What will that look like?”


    Pumpkin goggled at her. “Clothes, silly.”


    She left the room and came back again. Manrie was standing by the wall, examining the frescoes. “Pumpkin,” she asked, “who painted these?”


    “Oh, he was very sweet. He had spiky silver hair. And he liked to make up nonsense songs. He would paint our arms, too, if we asked him.”


    “Did he have a name?”


    “He was just The Painter.”


    “And where is he now?”


    “In the fields.”


    Manrie frowned. “He’s a farmer? That seems like a waste of his talents.”


    The girl shrugged. “Purgation,” she said.


    The door of the room was set on a spiraling ramp that seemed to descend through the whole building. It was wide, which was good, as the odd angle of the doorsill caused Manrie to trip, and she sprawled on the smooth stone and almost started rolling down. The ‘swaddling’ that Pumpkin had brought was a white shift, barely a robe, and Manrie felt it ruck up around her, revealing her nether regions. Pumpkin made no comment. She waited as Manrie scrambled back to her feet and then turned to lead her down the ramp.


    “We could go up,” Manrie suggested.


    The girl shrugged. “Maybe later. Now we’re going down.”


    “How high does it go?”


    “Very high. It’s the highest building. And you were very high up in it.”


    There were doors on either side of the ramp. All of them were bolted with three bolts. Manrie nodded at the inside doors. “What’s in there?”


    “Who’s in there,” Pumpkin corrected.


    “All right. Who’s in there?”


    “The Innocent Newcomers.”


    “And who are they?”


    “Wee little babies,” Pumpkin said, and laughed.


    “You lock up babies?”


    “Not real babies. Don’t worry. You might get to go there, once you’re done being born.”


    “Can I open the doors?”


    “If you want.”


    Manrie stopped at the next one and slid the bolts back. She opened the door and a dense, fungal smell wafted out at her. It was worse than Nuhrmer Jahnajeel’s reek. She reared back and raised a hand to cover her face. “What’s that?”


    “Just the Master’s Milk. It’s very good for babies.”


    “It smells disgusting.” She peered into darkness. She could see almost nothing. There was a voice sounding throughout the chamber. A disembodied voice that made Manrie’s head ache. There were individual words but they seemed smeared somehow, and her mind couldn’t grasp them. “Are there people in there?”


    “Babies,” Pumpkin reiterated. “Smile so that they have nice dreams.” She slipped past Manrie and stood in the doorway, cooing. “Sleep, little babies. Sleep well, little babies. Have sweet dreams.”


    Manrie stepped back. She felt sick to her stomach. She wished that she hadn’t eaten so much. The light in the ramp came from above, as if the top of the building were a thin egg shell that was being candled by the sun. But the air didn’t move, and the fungal odor seemed intent on filling the spiral. She turned to the door on the opposite side of the sloping hall and pushed back the bolts.


    The room beyond was full of light, and fresh air was coming in through an open window. There was an old man lying in the bed, quite naked beneath a tangled sheet. He turned to Manrie and blinked very blue eyes. “Is it now?” he asked. “Am I going to get the Purgation of the Cradle?”


    “I’ve just come in for some fresh air,” Manrie said, going quickly to the window.


    “Well, will it be soon?” the old man snapped.


    People were working in the fields below. She was on the other side of the tower, and she could see the waterfall. There was a tall building at its base, with a waterwheel that turned quickly in the churn of the cataract. Smoke was billowing from seven chimneys. The women in the fields didn’t turn their heads towards this building, but something in their posture showed their awareness of it. In one field, an oxen was pulling a plow, turning stalks of harvested wheat into the soil. Manrie breathed in fresh air as she watched, then turned to look at the old man.


    “What is the Purgation of the Cradle?”


    The blue eyes dimmed. His thin, rather moist mouth drooped into a frown. “You’re just another newborn,” he said.


    Pumpkin came into the room. She took Manrie’s hand without looking at the old man. “Come along,” she said.


    Back onto the ramp, and down. On the lower floors, the doors widened. They were left open, and Manrie could see that one led into a laundry, full of great billows of steam. Another led into a kind of kitchen, where people were slicing tubers on large cutting boards. No one looked up as Manrie went past. Another led into what appeared to be a bathing room. Pools on the floor, and long tables, where women were bending over naked bodies, scraping at them with shells. These rooms were much larger than the one that she’d woken up in, so the tower must widen at its base. And indeed, the ramp ended in a cavernous entry hall, with doors open onto the fields. This, too, had interior doors, set along the giant pillar in the center of the tower. They had no bolts that Manrie could see. She could hear a voice speaking in whatever room lay beyond them, but she couldn’t make out any words.


    Pumpkin led her out into the fields. They went along a path that ran between two pitches of broken earth. There were women kneeling as they harvested, each with her own row, each veiled, their head dresses casting gray shadows across the white cloth covering their faces. Were they blind, or was the cloth thin enough to see through? The fields ended and Manrie looked back. The tower looked like a woman in a wide skirt, her waist more than halfway up its height at the place where the spire thinned. The windows looked blank, but she had a sense that someone was watching her.


    There was a large expanse of open ground before they got to the fields that surrounded the next building, which seemed to be a weaver’s house. She could hear the thump of looms. Flax was growing in the fields that surrounded it. The stalks had been cut and the pods laid across the damp earth to soften. Although there was no work to do in these fields, there was a person kneeling at the front of each row. Both men and women. They were frowning down at the brown earth, and their mouths were moving, as if they were in the midst of silent recitation. Their robes were plain, homespun. Not for them the beautiful tapestries.


    “Is that purgation?” Manrie whispered to Pumpkin.


    “That? It’s the First Grounding Practice. They’ll teach you, once you are grown.”


    As they went through the flax fields, Manrie glanced back, and was shocked to see a familiar face among the kneeling figures. It took her a moment to place it. A face that she had seen in Tzurfaera. Obsidian hair and stubble that climbed high on his cheeks. One of the only survivors of the ambush on the road. She struggled for his name and found it. Farahzin. He gazed at her with a bewildered expression. “How am I here again?” he asked. “And in this body?” He raised both arms and waved them at her, as if he were planted in the earth and only able to signal his distress by agitating his leafy stalks. His was still injured, she saw. A red wound pierced through his palm.


    “Come,” Pumpkin said.


    “But I know him.”


    She glanced back, indifferently. “He came into the valley with you. But he woke up sooner. He was deemed an Innocent Newcomer. He’s just come from the cradle.”


    “What’s the cradle?”


    Pumpkin made a face. “You saw it, silly. You said that it smelled.”


    Manrie brushed this aside. “But I know him from before.”


    Pumpkin was unimpressed. “People are always coming here. Everyone wants to be here. They come from all over.”


    The girl led her across a bridge and to the building with seven chimneys. The sound of the waterfall was enormous and the air was full of spray. Pumpkin stopped at the end of the bridge. “You need to go on alone!” she shouted.


    “Where am I going?”


    “Into the Master’s House! Don’t worry. He’s waiting.”


    Manrie’s white shift was wet. It clung to her body. She was certain that it did nothing but accentuate her nakedness. Still, she moved forward. She studied the ground as she went, and halfway to an open door at the end of the path she pretended to trip, and palmed a satisfyingly jagged looking rock. The door was framed by heavy stones, and there were voices coming through it. She went to it and peered in, and immediately pulled her head away, as something squealed within the shadows of the room.


    “Another failure,” a voice said, and she recognized the resonant tones of the mushroom man.


    “But closer,” another voice said. “Closer. We have found the right genus. We only need to find the correct species.”


    “You have said that before.” A brooding silence. Then the mushroom man said, “Kill it.”


    A footstep, the sound of a hinge, a screech. Then silence. After a moment, the sound of a chair scraping back. A huff, as someone sat down. Then the pompous, plummy voice again. “Taeslahbin, invite the girl in.”