CHAPTER IThe squire he sat in Dolfya Town,
He swilled the blood-dark wine:
“O who can blight my happiness,
Or face the power that’s mine?”
Then up there spoke his daughter fair:
“The priest can end your joy;
The globe can sap your might away,
And the Mink can you destroy!”
—Ruck’s Ballad of the Mink
* * * *
The day that Revel killed a god, he woke early. There was a bitter taste in his mouth, and a pain in his ear where somebody’d hit him during a shebeen brawl the night before. He rolled over on his back. The bed was a hollowed place in the earth floor, filled with leaves and dried grass and spread with yellow-brown mink skins sewn into a big blanket; he’d slept on it every night of his twenty-eight years, but this morning it felt hard and uncomfortable.
The water gourd was emp
