The Redemption of Althalus Read Online Free Page A

mason laughed cynically. “It
was
sort of our patriotic duty, after all, and the rewards were nice and substantial. The rich men of Kanthon are all amateur stonemasons now, but oddly enough, not a single one of my pupils has a name that I can recognize. They all seem to have names connected to honest trades, for some strange reason. I guess they’re afraid that I might turn them in to the tax collectors if they give me their real names.”
    Althalus thought long and hard about that bit of information. The tax law of the philosophical new Aryo of Kanthon had more or less put him out of business. If a man was clever enough to hide his money from the tax collectors and their well-equipped demolition crews, what chance did an honest thief have? He could get into their houses easily enough, but the prospect of walking around all that shabby furniture while knowing that his feet might be within inches of hidden wealth made him go cold all over. Moreover, the houses of the wealthy men here were snuggled together so closely that a single startled shout would wake the whole neighborhood. Stealth wouldn’t work, and the threat of violence probably wouldn’t either. The knowledge that the wealth was so close and yet so far away gnawed at him. He decided that he’d better leave very soon, before temptation persuaded him to stay. Kanthon, as it turned out, was even worse than Deika.
    He left Kanthon the very next morning and continued his westward trek, riding across the rich grain fields of Treborea toward Perquaine in a distinctly sour frame of mind. There was wealth beyond counting down here in civilization, but those who had been cunning enough to accumulate it were also, it appeared, cunning enough to devise ways to keep it. Althalus began to grow homesick for the frontier and to devoutly wish that he’d never heard the word “civilization.”
    He crossed the river into Perquaine, the fabled farmland of the plains country where the earth was so fertile that it didn’t even have to be planted, according to the rumors. All a farmer of Perquaine had to do each spring was put on his finest clothes, go out into his fields, and say, “Wheat, please,” or, “Barley, if it’s not too much trouble,” and then return home and go back to bed. Althalus was fairly sure that the rumors were exaggerations, but he knew nothing about farming, so for all he knew there might even be a grain of truth to them.
    Unlike the people of the rest of the world, the Perquaines worshiped a female deity. That seemed profoundly unnatural to most people—either in civilization or out on the frontiers—but there was a certain logic to it. The entire culture of Perquaine rested on the vast fields of grain, and the Perquaines were absolutely obsessed with fertility. When Althalus reached the city of Maghu, he discovered that the largest and most magnificent building in the entire city was the temple of Dweia, the Goddess of fertility. He briefly stopped at the temple to look inside, and the colossal statue of the fertility Goddess seemed almost to leap at him. The sculptor who’d carved the statue had quite obviously been either totally insane or caught up in the grip of religious ecstasy when he’d created
that
monstrosity. There
was
a certain warped logic to it, Althalus was forced to concede. Fertility meant motherhood, and motherhood involved the suckling of the young. The statue suggested that the Goddess Dweia was equipped to suckle hundreds of babies all at the same time.
    The land of Perquaine had been settled more recently than Treborea or Equero, and the Perquaines still had a few rough edges that made them much more like the people of the frontiers than the stuffier people to the east. The taverns in the seedier parts of Maghu were rowdier than had been the case in Deika or Kanthon, but that didn’t particularly bother Althalus. He drifted around town until he finally located a place where the patrons were talking instead of brawling, and he