In the spring of the year before the year Zero, a new priest came from Riadom to the village of Scoms, which lay within faint sight of the mountains at the end of the world. He had traveled by barge up the wide river Prava, and from the port at Visselno he had ridden by oxcart into the mountain district, of which Scoms was one of the chief towns, and then through the forests and fields to what he had imagined would be a place of some consequence. It was hardly that. A sturdy fort sat on a middling hill that overlooked the wheat and potato fields, and from the fort a muddy road ran into the cluster of wooden buildings that made up the town. Thin columns of smoke trailed up from chimneys and cooking fires, and in every direction broad fields ran out from the town, ending at the line where the forests took up. From there, to the north, lay the mountains.

This region was known as the mountain district, but in truth the mountains had hardly begun at Scoms. A great range of peaks extended north from here to an unknown end, where some said that the land dropped off to nothingness and a man may look down on an endless field of swirling clouds. Beneath the clouds some said a cold sea roiled on forever northward into infinity. The mountains were the uncharted domain of bandits and land-toilers who had escaped from the fields what they might call freedom. It seemed to the priest that they had escaped nothing; their ends could only be cold and destitute amid the snows. To the south, where the foothills trailed off and the land rolled in vast and gentle waves, the grasslands and farming fields were fed by the two great rivers, Leva and Prava, which met far to the south at Riadom, the city from which the priest had set out some weeks before, the ancient capital of the land of Thane. This tiny and remote province of the great empire had at its center a great marsh called the Waterfog, and all across the land a mass of poor land-toilers farmed rocky fields under the watch of their betters.

The priest was a man of patience, as he had properly been raised to be in the seminaries and the schools, and he had not hurried to his new post in this distant and unfamiliar place. Anyone who met him knew his profession by sight. His slight build betrayed years bent over books instead of working the land, and his gentle, tired eyes revealed a thoroughly schooled clerical empathy for the poor. His black beard now flecked with hints of early grey, he wrapped his newish churchman-black cloak around him when the nights grew chilly. On the barge he had watched the land go by, turning to his books when he could, and he had taken his meals with the land-toilers. The Prava's deep brown waters carried with them the life of the land, and he did not fail to be thankful even when he had accidentally let slip his pipe off the side of the barge. He had been sad, for the pipe had been a gift upon his entry into the order, but he could see the purpose and measure of all things, and his loss was not so great.

At Visselno his assistant had met him with the oxcart. This was a favor from the lord of Scoms, Istan Famm. Together the priest and his assistant rode in the straw-filled rear while two sturdy young village men steered the cart through the rutted tracks and forded the shallow streams that came down from the mountains. The streams would find their way into the muddy Prava, and then past Visselno, over the priest's lost pipe, and far to the south, past his home at Riadom. There the Prava joined with the Leva, and together they flowed south, soon leaving Thane behind and disappearing into the land of the Masters.

The Masters... The priest had for his whole life walked in fear and deference to the blue-skinned race of geniuses who ruled the whole world. They rode through Thane on great stallions and walked the better streets of Riadom draped in gold. On one occasion some years ago he had seen the imperial emissary close enough to tell by his red pupils that he was truly of the superior race. It was the only time in his life that he was sure he had really seen one. Thanian lords might imitate them, but they could not mask their own lower-rung blue or brown eyes. In truth it did not matter that one was a land-toiler or a lord, because all Thanians lived in thrall to the Masters. This was their land, in a way, except that ordinary men and women still lived and toiled in these places: Riadom, Visselno, the lands between the Prava and the Leva, and all the poor mudpit villages from which the Thanians sent their crops to enrich the tables of the empire.

As a priest he served the True Belief, which the Masters had given Thane when they forced the land from ignorance. Many ranks of betters stood over him. The line of hierarchy ran from the lowly village priest up through the higher orders to the lord of Riadom himself, who served the great imperial Masters in the distant city of Sarai.

As the oxcart approached the dismal town, the priest's assistant pointed out the fort of Lord Famm. A single tower jutted up from the massive but crude stone walls, which appeared stained and rotten with age. In every direction lay vast fields where the trees had been cleared for tilling. Silent figures worked the fields on their hands and knees, stabbing sticks into the soil to make room for the seedlings, plucking grasses and weeds, and working into their clothes and skin the mud of the land. It would be ineradicable.

The villagers welcomed him with gifts of chickens and hardcrust bread. At dawn the next morning he stood on a stump outside his tiny wooden house in the center of their cluster of shacks that formed the heart of the village while they kneeled before him in obiesance. It was just as the schoolmasters had taught him it would be. The villagers received his wisdom in silence as God's light created the blessed new day. They brought him a sickly new baby wrapped in blankets, whose mother lay resting in a nearby shack. He held the baby up over his head to receive the light of the new day, and he kissed it gently on the cheeks.

"Thank you sower," the baby's own father said with great humility, with his seven other children grasped tightly around him. The baby's lips and fingers were blue and yellow. The priest grieved within already for it. He knew it might not last another day. He did not need to open his books now. He recited the Hyacinth's prayer for ill children in the original holy language of the Masters while the villagers listened silently. Then he repeated it in the rougher Thanian tongue so that they might understand his words.

God help this child who knows the love of family

God help this child to grow and breathe and live

God help this child to better serve His will

God help this child to be strong and be humble

God bless with his Light all this family

When he handed the little bundle back to the father he whispered his own personel blessing: "May you be humble in God's light."

"Thank you, sower, thank you. My whole family thanks you."

"The village thanks you!" Shouted a woman who stood at the rear of the congregants.

They gathered at the edge of the fields to cremate the little boy at dawn the next day. It was gloriously cloud-free and holy then, and the priest lit the fire with another prayer in the Masters' tongue. These were the words that the Hyacinth had spoken long ago in Sarai as her executioners came for her, and he did not know whether the Thanian language could encompass the great depths of joy and sadness that ringed the verses. This prayer he could not translate for the villagers. It was forbidden.

* * *

The priest kept largely to the contemplative routines he had learned as a boy and mastered as a young man in the seminaries and schools of dusty Riadom. Every sunrise he walked with the land-toilers out to their work amid the crops of Lord Famm and blessed them as the first morninglight shone across the fields.. He spoke with them, tried to learn their names, and when the spirit moved him he took a place beside them, rousting rabbits and tending to the crops. He reminded them of the dignity of their lot, and the humble place of man in God's great work. He supped with them, complimented their children when the children behaved, and saw them through sickness and pain. When the elder of the blacksmiths fell ill with a fever, the priest kept a vigil with the man's young wife and children. When the blacksmith died, the priest took to collecting donations from both the village and, by a stroke of courage, from the hand of Istan Famm, who could hardly hide his surprise at the request for food for the woman. Famm's face was a strange union of human and Master. It had long become the custom among the noble houses to paint themselves in the guise of the Masters, and even in the distant lands of the mountain district Lord Famm kept carefully to this practice. His skin, dyed carefully blue with secret oils, shone greasily in the lamplight of the great room. His hair, likewise colored a dirty white, hung in knots on his shoulders.

"Take her this," Famm had said. "As a token of my respect for the Church." He handed the priest the round loaf of black bread from the center of his table. The lord had then stalked from the room.

The priest's work was not all toil and warmth. It was the nature of the land-toiler, he supposed and had been taught all his life, to be listless and to drink. That they should beat their children and their women was a regrettable fact, but it was not against the law. That they should steal was another matter. Not more than a month after the priest arrived in the town, and only the night after he gave his first church-holiday sermon, to which the land-toilers had come with piety and fear, a land-toiler woman knocked on his door and begged that he intervene with the Lord's men.

The priest's assistant, who slept on a straw mat on the floor beside the door, tried to shush her and make her go away, but the priest awoke and looked out from his bed at the two figures in the firelight.

"I said not to disturb him!" The assistant hissed.

"Please tell the sower," she begged. "They've come for my brother! They say he stole grain from the Lord's own stores!"

The assistant hit her and pushed her toward the door. "Listen to me, woman!" She cried out, and the assistant cursed.

The priest got out of bed. "I am awake, woman. You are Bonnet, yes? The shepherd's wife?"

"Yes, sower! They came to my brother's house! They accuse him of stealing! Please, sower! Please come!"

He put on his black robe and followed her to the shack where her brother's family lived. Famm's men had already taken her brother, whose name was Tallet, and now a small group of land-toilers murmured among themselves and comforted Tallet's wife and three children. The wife, fully pregnant, pleaded with the priest to save her husband's life. "They'll kill him, Father! What'll I do?"

The priest had been warned by his elders, who feared that he might not have the strength for his post, not to coddle wrongdoers or their kin. Law was law, and the Church preached fealty. The priest ran his fingers through his thick black beard as he remembered the admonition against undue pity, and knelt beside the woman.

"Did he steal?"

The wife said nothing. Her children clung to her dress. She looked down.

"Teach your children, then, about right and wrong! Their father may not have the chance."

* * *

The priest ran through the town, past the wooden shacks and the knotty trees that overhung the road. His assistant followed, trailed in turn by a cottle of curious land-toilers, and out just past the last hut they came upon Famm's men. They had beaten Tallet quiet, and two of them carried him by the arms as his feet dragged lamely behind him. Their leader was a brute by the name of Richard, whose thick arms and callused hands were the terror of the land-toilers. He had grown up among them to be a bully, and recognized as such by the old Sheriff, he had become Sheriff in turn. He stood at least a full head over the priest.

"We've one for the hanging tree," Richard told the priest when he saw him. "Keep those people back!" He turned back threateningly toward the land-toilers, who retreated toward the village. Out along the road, at the bottom of the hill on which Famm's fort stood, there was an ancient oak. Leafless and dead, its strong branches served Lord Famm's will.

"Has the man confessed?" The priest asked. He recognized the prisoner as one who had sat in the front of the congregation the day before, praying as intently as any. Now his bruised face bled, and terror filled his stupefied eyes.

"Not yet," Richard replied. "He is a drunk and a loafer, but we found this!" Another of Famm's men held out a sack of grain to the priest. In the moonlight the priest saw that it was a plain hemp sack that could have come from anywhere.

"Out of the way, churchman," Richard said derisively, spraying the priest with his spittle. "Wait at the hanging tree if you want to be of use."

Richard approached the priest, who now looked up at him.

"Let me speak with him," the priest said. Richard grunted warily to his men, and they threw Tallet down. The priest knelt beside him and took a handful of his greasy hair. The priest whispered angrily. "You're a waste and a wretch if you lie to me, friend! You'll hang, and your family will starve. You're a pious man, if a drunk, and I expect the truth. Now tell me, did you take this sack?"

Tallet blazed with fear. He breathed heavily, then whispered. "Yes, sower. I don't know why."

Richard smiled and removed a whip from his belt. "You've done a better job than I, churchman. I thought he might never confess. Take him!"

"Sower!"

The priest filled with horror. Standing over the pleading Tallet. All around him Lord Famm's men laughed. Richard called for a rope. The hanging tree waited. The priest stammered an objection, his hands flew about like butterflies, but Richard would not listen.

"You'll not teach the land-toiler with mercy, Churchman. Mercy or rewards. I've heard about you. You're fresh from the city. You don't know these scoundrels like I do. They learn only by example."

The priest threw himself onto the thief. He looked up at Richard and Famm's men. "He's a sinner, yes. But he has a wife and children to feed, and I'll not see them suffer! It's the brew that led him to this!" To Tallet, who lay motionless beneath him, he said, "Will you swear not to drink? Will you swear before God?"

"Yes!"

Richard snorted. "All right, Father. You want to save this man? You want to protect his whore and his rats? Here's your chance."

He held out the whip. "You administer a good solid punishment. Teach him respect for the good Lord Famm."

The priest refused. Richard's men seized Tallet and the priest ran after them. Richard told his men to stop. The priest accepted the deal with a whisper. He took the whip and unraveled it. The oily leather felt strange in his bookish hands. He had never held one before. Uncertain, he looked at Richard, who stood uncomfortably close to him. "Go on, churchman!" Richard snarled. "Teach this pig the Church's position on theft!"

The priest quavered. Richard reached for the whip. The priest jerked it away from him. He looked down at the thief. Then he raised the whip high over his head and brought it down with a crack on Tallet's back. The thief cried out, and looked up at the priest in amazement.

"Father!" Tallet cried out. "Father please--"

"You've a duty under God, friend!" The priest said. His voice barely escaped his lips. "To be humble!"

Crack.

"To work!"

Crack.

"To bear your burdens and act like a man of God!"

Crack. Crack. Crack.

With every stroke the priest looked to Richard, and with every stroke Richard demanded another. The priest complied, and admonished the thief with every blow to remember that this was for his own good, for the good of his children, and the good of his soul. Finally his strength failed him. Richard was not satisfied. The priest begged for Tallet's life, but Famm's men easily pushed him aside and laughed at his demands. So Famm's men dragged the priest along with them, and the thief, to the hanging tree at the foot of the fort of Lord Famm, and when they tied the rope around the thief's neck and hoisted him into the air, the priest prayed and prayed for the man's absolution. He prayed for an end to crime and theft, and for the abolition of brew, and he prayed for the good of the family of Tallet and swore that he would provide for them, and faintly and at the end of his prayer, as Famm's men pushed him away and back toward the village, he prayed that he might forget himself and this night, and his own immeasurable fear.

The body of the thief hung for three days, as was the custom of justice in the mountain district. The priest could not forget. He brought food for the family of Tallet, and preached ever harder against the traditional brew, but when he slept he saw the man's face, saw the kicking legs and the laughing Sheriff Richard, and felt once again the oily whip in his own guilty hands.

At dawn on the fourth day the villagers cut the body down and carried it to a prepared pyre at the edge of the field. The first rays of the new rising sun were on the body when the priest put the torch to the oil-soaked bed of dry branches on which the broken body of Tallet the thief now lay.

"Many, many years ago," he intoned with great sadness and shame, with his voice constricted near to a whisper, "a young girl lived with her family in a far distant land. She was not a Thanian, she did not look like us, but she was a girl all the same, and she took ill and died when she was only nine years old. Her family mourned in their own way I guess, as you would, and as we all do, and they went on living, as we will here today. But something happened to her that had never happened before. She did not stay dead, but after three days in the grave she returned. She told them that she had seen a great light that permeated through everything. She had walked in this light in a strange land where she had never been. She had seen many people there who were long dead, and she told her family that the light had come straight from the heart of God almighty. This was a light of love and forgiveness, and she said that she could feel God's presence in the light, and that after she walked and talked to the spirits of the dead the light had told her to come back and tell the world about it. This is what she did. This is how we know that no matter what we suffer in this world and no matter what sadness comes down upon us, that there is something greater that shines through all of us. We cannot see it and cannot feel it except when we open ourselves and let ourselves believe that it is there. Tallet's wife and family must do this now -- indeed we all must do it -- because the burden of pain is too great for simple people like us to bear. You know that Tallet was a good man who treated his wife and his children well. He was a good man in the fields too, but we know that he drank and he made one terrible mistake that cost his life. I know this. I was there when he died. If he could reach out to us now he would tell us that the great light in which he now walks shines through everything. He will see his children again one day. He will. He will always be their father. He would tell them now if he could, that the burden of right-acting is a small one to bear, that the burden of our rightful place -- as faithful people, as toilers on the land, as fathers and mothers -- this is a small burden too. That little girl who first told the world what she had seen beyond death, we call her the Hyacinth now, because her spirit was that of a precious and rare flower. There is joy and freedom in the next world, she tells us. I will tell you that the only way to be sure of that is to obey your betters, pray now for greater faith in the light of God, and keep hope close to your heart."

The flames devoured the body as the wind picked up.

"Renounce the brew!" The priest cried out. "Accept your place!"

Then he recited the Hyacinth's final prayer. None of the mourners understood his words. That hardly mattered now. The priest understood them. He needed to pray today. That the Hyacinth had, herself, been from the race of the Masters not one of the land-toilers questioned.

It was not their place to do so.