Arha’s guard and servant was coming slowly along the inner side of the wall. He would stoop to pull a wild onion, of which he held a large, limp bunch, then straighten up and look about him with his small, dull, brown eyes. He had grown fatter with the years, and his hairless yellow skin glistened in the sun.
“Slide down part way on the men’s side,” Arha hissed, and both girls wriggled lithe as lizards down the far side of the wall until they could cling there just below the top, invisible from the inner side. They heard Manan’s slow footsteps coming by.
“Hoo! Hoo! Potato face!” crooned Arha, a whispering jeer faint as the wind among the grasses.
The heavy tread halted. “Ho there,” said the uncertain voice. “Little one? Arha?”
Silence.
Manan went forward.
“Hoo-oo! Potato face!”
“Hoo, potato belly!” Penthe whispered in imitation, and then moaned, trying to suppress giggles.
“Somebody there?”
Silence.
“Oh well, well, well,” the eunuch sighed, and his slow feet went on. When he was gone over the shoulder of the slope, the girls scrambled back up onto the top of the wall. Penthe was pink with sweat and giggles, but Arha looked savage.
“The stupid old bellwether, following me around everywhere!”
“He has to,” Penthe said reasonably. “It’s his job, looking after you.”
“Those I serve look after me. I please them; I need please nobody else. These old women and half-men, these people should leave me alone. I am the One Priestess!”
Penthe stared at the other girl. “Oh,” she said feebly, “oh, I know you are, Arha-“
“Then they should let me be. And not order me about all the time!”
Penthe said nothing for a while, but sighed, and sat swinging her plump legs and gazing at the vast, pale lands below, that rose so slowly to a high, vague, immense horizon.
“You’ll get to give the orders pretty soon, you know,” she said at last, quietly. “In two more years we won’t be children any more. We’ll be fourteen. I’ll go into the Godking’s temple, and things will be about the same for me. But you’ll really be the High Priestess then. Even Kossil and Thar will have to obey you.”
The Eaten One said nothing. Her face was set, her eyes under black brows caught the light of the sky in a pale glitter.
“We ought to go back,” Penthe said.
“No.”
“But the weaving mistress might tell Thar. And soon it’ll be time for the Nine Chants.”
“I’m staying here. You stay, too.”
“They won’t punish you, but they will punish me,” Penthe said in her mild way. Arha did not reply. Penthe sighed, and stayed. The sun was sinking into haze high above the plains. Far away on the long, gradual slant of the land, sheep bells clanked faintly and lambs bleated. The spring wind blew in dry, faint gusts, sweetsmelling.
The Nine Chants were nearly over when the two girls returned. Mebbeth had seen them sitting on the ‘Men’s Wall’ and had reported this to her superior, Kossil, High Priestess of the Godking.
Kossil was heavy-footed, heavy-faced. Without expression in face or voice she spoke to the two girls, telling them to follow her. She led them through the stone hallways of the Big House, out the front door, up the knoll to the Temple of Atwah and Wuluah. There she spoke with the High Priestess of that temple, Thar, tall and dry and thin as the legbone of a deer.
Kossil said to Penthe, “Take off your gown.”
She whipped the girl with a bundle of reed canes, which cut the skin a little. Penthe bore this patiently, with silent tears. She was sent back to the weaving room without supper, and the next day also she would go without food. “If you are found climbing over the Men’s Wall again,” Kossil said, “there will be very much worse things than this happen to you. Do you understand, Penthe?” Kossil’s voice was soft, but not kindly. Penthe said, “Yes,” and slipped away, cowering and flinching as her heavy clothing rubbed the cuts on her back.
Arha had stood beside Thar to watch the whipping. Now she watched Kossil clean the canes of the whip.