and wet with sweat even down his legs. He squinted on leaving the dimness of the
temple, for the time was mid-afternoon, not night at all.
Had it begun then, even in daylight?-the hallucinations, the false feeling of
importance that was a lie swarming up like a nest of spiders from the lees of
swilled wine?
Or did I hear-could I have heard … a god? . The god?
He had walked from the temple, seeing nothing and no one. A person apart and an
island indeed! Until, as if a hood had been lifted off his head to bare his
eyes, he saw Mignureal.
She came directly toward him, looking at him, that S’danzo daughter of his
friend Moonflower of the Seeing eyes. Moonflower who so well knew him-and did
not want him having aught to do with her daughter. Mignureal. Heading
purposefully toward him, gazing at him. A girl who looked thirteen and was
older, long since pubertous and interested in Hanse-fascinated with Hanse as a
woman is ever fascinated by and with the rascal. It pleased her to act as if she
was thirteen, not a woman of sixteen, most of whose age-peers were wedded or at
least bedded.
“My daughter is very young and thinks you are just so romantic a figure,” that
great big woman said, who was such a pretty little woman inside the masses of
flesh her husband so loved. “Will you just pretend she is your sister?”
“Oh you would not want that,” Hanse had assured her, in one of those rare
revelations as to the sort of childhood he must have had. “She is my friend’s
daughter and I shall call her cousin.”
Hanse meant that promise. Besides, Mignureal had seen him quaking and blubbering