water, trying to keep her body from his eyes and unable to think of anything but the strange and terrible revelations the Messenger had delivered the previous winter about Mother, Father and the First Precept. As if he were thinking of the same thing, Abil couldn’t keep his eyes off her body, and stared at the water in front of her and the rippling, distorted images it bore.
“Am I a beast?” Qayna replied. There was no word for slave in the tongue of her birth, as there was yet no one to enslave. “Am I a mere thing that has no say in its own use? Am I a garment to be worn and cast aside, a tool with which to harrow up the earth, a lamb to be slaughtered?”
“It is the First Precept,” the Messenger intoned. Between the canyon walls that enclosed the spring, his words rolled like the cracking of the heavens. He hesitated. “Do you choose to disobey the will of Heaven?”
“You would not have me choose at all!” Qayna shouted. The heat of the anger warmed her against the water’s cool bite. “You would have me only lower my head and submit! That is not the joy of the Garden, that is not the path of my Mother!”
Abil crouched beside the water, beside the stone on which she had laid her things. Perhaps he meant it as a way not to appear threatening, but it brought him closer to Qayna and that felt like an invasion. Besides, squatting on his heels, he opened his tunic and exposed his body in a way that reminded Qayna uncomfortably of the fact that he, like she, was no longer a child, and that his body, too, had prepared to obey the First Precept.
“Let’s choose to obey together,” Abil said, grinning. “We could choose to do otherwise together, but let’s choose to obey.”
“Obedience is sacrifice,” the Messenger trumpeted. His voice was loud and brassy, but Qayna thought she heard the faintest note of compassion in it. “To obey is to sacrifice the other things you might have done, the other possibilities you might have enjoyed. If those other possibilities were always and in all respects bad, obedience would be painless. Every commandment is a summons to obedience, a call to sacrifice on the altar.”
The horrible, ineluctable tone in which the Messenger spoke, and the tiny trace of warmth in his voice, only made the content of what he said completely unacceptable, even though, Qayna realized, the words were true.
“I’m not ready!” she cried, treading water. “Not now! Can I not wait?”
“It is the First Precept,” the Messenger repeated. “You must choose now.” The gigantic being’s voice softened considerably. “I, too, have no choice.”
“Come on, Qayna,” Abil splashed into the water after her. He was laughing, but Qayna didn’t think there was anything to laugh about, and his mad chuckle did nothing to break the rising wall of tension in her breast.
She backed away from him, towards the edge of the spring.
“You know me. You know the Messenger’s teaching, and the Way, and what Father and Mother have done.” He swam towards her.
She splashed out of the water on the far side, staring down at her brother. He stared up at her, his eyes on her naked body, and now his look truly became the hungry stare of a wild animal. Qayna felt vulnerable and threatened, the more so when she realized that the Messenger was staring at her, too.
And the Messenger’s eyes, always so patient and mechanical and full of rote wisdom, were now full of something else. Something animal, something that burned.
Abil splashed for the bank. He was a fast swimmer, faster than Qayna, and her heart and mind raced in fear. She ran around the edge of the water, brambles and sharp stones cutting into the work-toughened skin of her feet, running for her clothes.
“Stop!” the Messenger roared, but he didn’t move to intervene.
“Stop!” Abil cried, and he sloshed out of the water on her heels.
Qayna scooped up her scant belongings in both hands and kept running. Along the bank of the spring she raced, into thickets of long-spined thorn trees that grew where the stone raced above the water higher and higher in narrow ledges and steep slopes. Abil had longer legs than she did, and heavier muscle, but she thought she was more nimble and might be able to evade him if she could get to where agility would make a difference.
Abil caught her in the