Naamah's Blessing - Jacqueline Carey [210]
On the morrow, we met with the Sapa Inca Huayna and went to view the devastation the ants had wrought.
At that, I did weep. All the terraced fields were stripped bare, the earth churned and barren. In their hunger, the ants had laid bare every stalk, burrowed the length of every furrow. Women and children scavenged the fields, sifting through the dirt with their fingers in the hope of finding an overlooked tuber.
But the ants had been thorough. Their passage had cut a swath a league wide across the land, a broad trail of lifeless brown leading eastward as far as the eye could see. Everywhere the land was cultivated, it had been ravaged.
“Ah, gods!” I whispered to the newly crowned Sapa Inca. “I’m so sorry.”
Huayna gave a stoic shrug. “You did not bring the plague of ants upon us, lady. Lord Pachacuti did, with my foolish youngest brother’s help.” His expression softened. “I do not forget that you wept for my father’s death, too.” He held out one hand. Three kernels of maize lay in his palm. “In the past, we would seek to appease the gods with sacrifices were such a tragedy to occur. But the Maidens of the Sun say you possess a gift of life, and it is to life we must now trust. Is it so?”
I took a deep breath. “I pray it is.”
He lowered himself to one knee, poking the kernels into the earth and making a mound. “Show me.”
I knelt, pressing my hands into the soil. Summoning the twilight, I breathed softly over the mound. I felt the kernels awake and quicken, sending out green shoots that pierced the mound.
The Sapa Inca Huayna’s eyes widened. “Can you do this for all?” He gestured across the devastated landscape. “All of this?”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly, brushing dirt from my hands. “Not like this, I think. Not all at once. But if you will set every man, woman, and child to replanting your fields, I will do my best to quicken them.”
“It is a risk,” he said slowly. “Many claim it would be better to eat the seeds we have in store, for there is no time for crops to ripen. Better to consume what we have, and send for new seed in the spring.”
Trust me.
I echoed the words aloud. “Trust me.”
His black gaze weighed me, and after a moment, he nodded. “We will attempt this thing.”
It was a prodigious undertaking. True to his word, Prince Thierry lent his own hand to the endeavor, ordering our entire company to do the same. Under the direction of the Quechua farmers, D’Angeline noblemen burnt brown by the sun worked side by side with the denizens of Qusqu, digging and stooping in endless rows, planting multicolored kernels of maize and sprouting chunks of seed potatoes.
Day after day, I walked the fields where they labored, my feet bare that I might feel the soil beneath them, coaxing a thousand hidden sparks of life to quicken. Betimes it felt as though I walked amidst constellations of earth-bound stars. I breathed the Breath of Earth’s Pulse and the Breath of Trees Growing. When the fields were irrigated, I breathed the Breath of Ocean’s Rolling Waves.
At night, I slept like the dead, drained and dreamless. But I was using my gift as it was intended, and every morning, I found the strength to rise.
Without the system of distribution that even Raphael had found worthy of praise, I daresay we would have starved. But even as the last meager hoard of stores had been distributed and the last pack-animal shorn and slaughtered, supplies began trickling in from distant quarters.
Not enough to survive the winter without crops, but enough to keep going. I tightened the woolen cord knotted around my waist and ignored the hunger pangs in my belly.
I prayed to the Maghuin Dhonn Herself, and to Blessed Elua and all of his Companions, most especially to Anael, the Good Steward—the man with the seedling cupped in his hand, I had called him since childhood.
When green seedlings emerged from the earth, unfurling leaves and tendrils, I breathed the Breath of Wind’s Sigh and the Breath of Embers Glowing, welcoming them to the open sky and the sun’s warm kiss.
I do not