"Something is upsetting you."
They had not spoken all evening, neither the wolf nor the woman. He had gone to hunt, she had fried fish, saving some oil in a bowl she'd carved. Doe was the first to speak now, while they waited together for dawn and for sleep. She was cradling Loomahk's head and scratching him lightly behind his ears, but she needed no wolf-keen sense to know he was not soothed.
He looked up at her without moving his head. His resulting face was very dog-like, and she almost laughed.
"We are good friends, you and I, aren't we?" he asked. "We can talk about anything without condemnation."
She nodded.
"Then please--tell me why you left the village. I would like to hear your story."
She bit her lip. "You heard something about it."
He nodded.
"From whom?"
He didn't answer.
"No, you don't have to say. Listen then. I travelled a lot, I sang for funerals from here to the coast of the Saykree--but I kept coming back here--there, rather." She fluttered her hand briefly in the direction of the village past the trees. "What I should have done was come back directly to Gen-Re-Koh. I think this is what I was aiming for, without knowing it. You and Re, my new life-love."
"Go on."
So she told the story. In her last visit to the village, she met a young priest of Oo, the spiritual guide of all who lived there. The priest had not been a follower of Oo for long. Once he had gotten his call, though, he had poured himself into the role, forswearing all his appetites, fasting for weeks on end, shutting himself in his study with books and calculating devices, emerging only to preach the ascetic life. Doe shook her head as she recounted this portion of her tale. "Save me from the newly converted--they of all enthusiasm and little sense!"
The grey wolf shot her a surprised look, but apparently Doe hadn't heard herself.
Doe was drawn to this priest, who, though not required by his vocation, had renounced the taking of a wife or lover. He renounced anything that was not an abstraction.
This had fascinated her. "I would argue with him for hours in the village square," Doe said. "He liked the challenge, I think. Most everyone else went along with what he said. I put up a fight, so I got all the attention." There was a note of pride in her voice, the satisfaction of a troublemaker. She knew what the priest did not--his real motive behind the hours of debates. And she decided to let him in on the secret.
She worked with him often--the priest said the prayers over the dying, she keened the grief. They would meet in his study to plan the order of the funeral, and often the planning was forsaken in favor of more hours of theological debate.
"He was a delicate man," Doe said sadly. "I used that to my advantage. I could push him to the cracks in his certainty, to where he was beginning to have doubts."
Then one day, as they argued in the study (where she'd latched the door lest they be disturbed) she finally asked the question he could not answer. "You preach against every pleasure," she said, "but I don't think you know what pleasure is. How can you do that?" She took the priest's hand, using its fingers to untie her bodice. She glided his hand against her skin and whispered, "How can you know what pleasure feels like?"
She had her victory, but the next day he was gone before she was awake. She went looking for him, but found instead a notice that her sort of singing was now forbidden. Singing funerals was too vulgar a display of passion for sacred acts. Seething, and hoping to turn public opinion in her favor, she staged her protest by making an effigy of the priest and moving through the square dressed in a bedsheet, like a wronged woman. Once a sizable crowd gathered, she stabbed effigy's heart--but here she'd misjudged badly. The priest was the embodiment of the crowd's religion, and well-loved besides, even if he was extreme in his renunciations.
"And then I came here," Doe finished. "I didn't have a choice. And my heart was broken."