Among all these pleasurable details, Ellin could not understand her uneasiness. There was something in the atmosphere of the place, the city, or perhaps the planet, that made her feel queasy. A melancholy in the air. A sadness. A late-autumn, leaf-burning, chill-wind-blowing, inexorable-lifeloss-coming kind of feeling. She felt it like a ghostly hand on her shoulder, and it made no sense at all.
“Do you feel it?” she whispered to Bao, her eyes on the back of the veiled coachman.
Bao stared out at the world, looked up at the sky, across the valley at the long shredded lines of smoke trailing away to the south. “Something,” he admitted in his woman’s voice. “The hairs on my neck are standing on end.”
When they left the carriage at the foot of the Temple stairs, Ellin stopped a young woman and introduced herself, asking to be taken to someone in charge. She and Bao were escorted into the forecourt of the Temple, where they watched as women placed lighted incense sticks in great sand-filled basins on iron tripods. Smoke rose from hundreds of glowing wands to fill the vault with haze that was lit by vagrant rays of light from high, gem-colored windows. Seen from below, the smoke shone in fragments of ruby and emerald, sapphire, amethyst, and amber, a shifting glory against the gold mosaic tiles of the ceiling.
“It is only the imperfection in the atmosphere that allows us to see the light,” said a voice at their shoulders. “So with us, only our own imperfections allowing us to see what perfection might be.”
The person addressing them was tall and thin and brown, dressed in a crimson, long-sleeved garment topped by a complicated headdress of striped wine and flame. “I am D’Jevier Passenger,” she said. “One of the Temple Hags.”
“Madam,” Ellin bowed. “My name is Ellin Voy and this is … Gandra Bao. We are uncertain as to the respectful form of address … “
“Ma’am will do,” said D’Jevier. “Or, you may call me simply Hag or Oh, Hag, or Revered Hag, though I doubt the latter is always sincere. I am your servant, Ma’am, and that of the Hagions.”
“The Hagions?” Ellin cocked her head. The Questioner had assured her that this movement, properly executed, elicited information all by itself. Persons often helped the merely puzzled while they withheld information from the demanding.
“Come,” said the Hag. “You will understand better if you see the Temple proper. We close it to men’s eyes. For millennia, mankind was so conditioned to believe that the only possible God is created in the image of a very large and powerful male, that the mere idea of a goddess made the entire male gender overwrought. Even here, on Newholme, where the Hagions have reigned for generations, we find it necessary to keep menfolk’s mouths and minds busy with other things.”
D’Jevier held aside one of the heavy curtains and they passed through into the Temple proper, Bao doing so without hesitation. So far as he was concerned, the moment he put on his wig, he became a woman, and he stayed a woman until he took it off.
The Hagions stood along the far, curved wall, their heads—or what would have been their heads—well above Ellin’s height, even though the floor was much lower where the images stood. The robes expressed a female form and a female head within a vacancy. Here I am, each statue proclaimed, invisibly existent.
“Have they names?” Bao whispered in a charming and completely womanly voice. Ellin was silent, though she felt both awed and excited by invisible images, so palpably present.
“The Goddess to the left is the maiden, in the center, the woman, to the right, an old woman, a crone. These ages typify differing types of power. There is also present a fourth, without shape or age, a spirit, invisible. The directory of Hagions is there,” said D’Jevier, indicating the low lectern at the center of the arc of effigies. “Please feel free to glance at it.”
Ellin and Bao did so, turning the pages, finding there name after name they had never heard of. D’Jevier spoke from behind them: “There are many aspects of divinity. Some are useful for occasions of joy. Others when we are troubled … “