The God-Death of Halla Tina Connolly Halla got halfway out the window, stolen brooch in hand, and then the dizzies hit. She swore as the world rocked around her. She kicked off the sandstone wall by instinct and thumped to the ground. The gold plate stuffed down her shift knocked her ribs and all her breath whooshed out. She gasped like a fish in the humid air. Voices. Halla stumbled over the cut stone and clover of the landowner’s garden. Her breath rushed back with loud wheezes and she flung herself into the ubiquitous bamboo groves dividing one house from the next. A bamboo leaf sucked into her mouth and she spat. Once her family had been guests at this very house. Her father, one of the elite liaisons between the landowners and the holy, had been deeply honored...and feared. Halla had sat on that very bit of stone in a starched white shift, praying that she wouldn’t disgrace herself. But that was ten years ago and several classes above. That memory wouldn’t save her fingers if she were caught this morning. The landowner was a heavy woman, whose flesh swung through the gaps in her chiton as she thudded around the side of the house. Two maids trailed her. “I heard someone!” she panted. “Search the house!” Halla breathed relief as she crept through the narrow gaps in the bamboo stands, one hand pressing her laboring ribs. The dizziness was gone now. It was only short sharp bursts these days; nothing like the attacks of her childhood. The big ones came at predictable times. Stupid of her for staying in the house that long. The open brooch pricked her palm and she drew it up, watching its emeralds glitter in the green-tinted light. It was an unexpected haul, worth the pain in her side. If she added it and the plate to her small cache it might...might it be enough to buy a bit of land? Halla squinched her eyes shut against that hope. She tucked the brooch under her shift and twisted her way out the other side of the grove. The heart of the city was even more crowded today—market and temple, sellers and enforcers. The temple reared in the air as she turned corners, a golden glamour of stone, an island in a sea of blue-robed holy. She wended through priests, temple assistants, nuns, novices: all preparing for the next day’s celebration. And there, as she had known—a crowd gathered in the judging square at the temple’s front, where the Mouth of the God stood on the dais. Morning judging had begun. Sick fascination drew Halla in. She kept low, slipped behind a group of sturdy landowners. Ragged laborers argued in furtive voices, one gesturing with missing fingers. The stolen plate was rigid against her chest and she rolled her shoulders forward as she watched, trying to make her shift hang loose. As always, the Mouth was flanked by his two young novices, a boy and a girl. His hidden hands, folded in his blue robe, signified that he carried out only the directives of the God. The girl and the boy stood in for the God’s two immortal assistants: mute Habek and one-handed Iva. “Fellow possibilities of the God,” said the Mouth. He was dark and thin with sharp eyes. His smooth voice slid to every corner of the crowded judging square. “He is glad you have come to be with those who have erred, as they submit to divine will. Your eyes will be his eyes as he sees his will accomplished. We are all the eyes of the God.” “May he see through us,” answered the crowd. A palanquin stood at one corner of the judging square. More priests crowded around it, and a young boy in blue—the priestling, the chosen one—sat inside it. Tomorrow on the new decade he would be invested as the new Mouth. Then he would be the one to hear the directives of the God, to relay the justice of the divine. “Through you, he will hear the accused submit to his fair judgment,” said the Mouth. “We are all the ears of the God.” “May he listen through us.” Two nuns lit smoky torches. The laborer being judged was chained to a pole in the depression at the foot of the dais. Guards fanned out around him and a short priest stepped forward, a moving bundle of net and feathers in his hands. Halla spread her feet apart, bracing herself. She swallowed. The Mouth made no gesture, spoke no words, just looked at the prisoner. The prisoner’s head swung up as the compulsion of the God surged through the Mouth and touched him. The short sharp dizziness hit Halla at the same instant. She kept her feet braced and rode it out. She did not know why she was attuned to the moods of the God, but so it always had been. Yet another reason she should have her rightful place back, among the holy rich. “Morsel of the God,” said the Mouth. “A landowner has accused you of robbing him with a knife. Tell us what you have done.” The man’s head swung wildly, his fingers grasping towards the straining netted bundle. The touch of the God on an unholy man was not pretty. Halla could sense it, crackling the air from the Mouth to the man. It was a compulsion that filled him with blood lust, blanketed his mind with one urge: kill the dove. “Nothing, I did nothing.” The short priest held the dove just out of reach as the man frothed. The torment would not cease till he succumbed to the God’s compulsion and killed the bird—and the priests would not let him have the bird until he confessed. No one could resist the will of the God for long. Then the Mouth would proclaim the sentence. The God generally decreed temple service for landowners, whipping or mutilation for laborers. But if the crime or the victim was great enough—death. If the God decreed death, the priests would take the prisoner this night to the ring on the hill and chain him there. At dawn, the God would lay that same bloody compulsion on one of his subjects to carry out the execution. Perhaps someone who stood right there in the unruly crowd, gloating over the man’s agonies. Someone hard at work right now, or fighting or stealing or praying. The God chose at random. It was part of the service to him, and it had to be carried out. The condemned man would be executed. Just like her mother. Halla realized her crossed arms were digging the rim of the plate into her sore ribs, and she forced herself to let her arms fall. “You must speak the truth of the story,” said the Mouth. “I wasn’t there. It wasn’t me.” The prisoner shook, but he wasn’t crying. Sometimes they cried. “We are all the fingers of the God,” intoned the Mouth. “May he work through us,” answered the crowd. A ragged laborer woman next to Halla spat. Another was weeping. The man was red and white now, neck corded, trying to reach the dove to kill it. This was the moment when they broke, when they babbled, when they said anything. Halla lowered her head and turned away. She slid through the crowd to the back of the temple. There the shops and houses pressed up against it in profusion, there you could slip away unseen. Her heart still beat high with the tension of the judging square. Unreleased tension—the uncompleted death of the bird rang her bones like a prickling line of ants. The prisoner was holding out against the God longer than most. Halla wove around blue-robed nuns, a landowner in gold embroidery, a dirty berry-seller with a wooden hand cart, until with a snap the prickles vanished and her bones went silent. The bird must be dead, and the touch of the God, vanished. She wondered, not for the first time, how it felt to have the God leave you. To know his touch, painful as it was, and then to see it go, to be human and plain once more. Her prickly visions were surely a millionth of what it would be to know the God himself. She crept into an alley shadow, away from the clash of crowds. There she stood in darkness and tried to maneuver the plate down her shift. When she finally slid it free, she looked up to see the dirty berry-seller, leaning on his cart and looking straight at her. Her first reaction was a shock of recognition, which she immediately dismissed. Her life had changed for the worse a couple times; instead of consorting with the landowners and holy, she knew the laborers and thieves. Yet even they had beds and roofs. She had not yet stooped to familiarity with vagrants. The man was old, his hair a white tangle. His face was so wrinkled and his grey eyes so wandering that she could not tell if his expression was lust or disgust. Plain old idiocy, likely. She stashed the plate behind a pile of fish netting in the alley, hoping he wasn’t alert enough to steal it. Still, it was nothing compared to the brooch, or to what she might find within the temple. “Here you go, old man,” said Halla, and flipped him a cent. “Just stop staring at me.” The coin landed in a paper twist of yellow gooseberries. Halla stared a moment, then flipped her thumb and strode past. “You didn’t see nothing.” She hurried on to the hidden door that led into the rear of the temple, attempting to match her rhythm to the crunch of people. Her palms were wet. The image of the prisoner, red-faced and shaking, was strong. But today was the day to slip into the temple—all the extra pomp would be out for the decade celebration tomorrow. The tithing room, the indoor altar, the worship hall—all those places would be guarded. But there was a little room at the back where ceremonial props were stored. Ten years ago she had been th...
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