Si'Wren's eyes grew large in shock and alarm as she paused in preparing her repast to look up at him suddenly. She was about to retire to her tent, but all thought of nourishment was forgotten as she shook her head vigorously in the negative. Then in response to his words she put aside her breakfast and rose to her feet. Resorting to her tent, she retrieved the clay tablet of the night before and emerged holding it by it's bamboo-backed box frame.
'Not so', she wrote, and showed it to him.
Then, growing bolder, she turned it to herself, and underlined with exaggerated slowness this direct refutation, and turned it again to show him, regarding him eye to eye with a certain sense of somber gravity. She was not talking so much with words now, but with her entire physical posture for added emphasis.
He could have had her executed, for it was dangerously disloyal to contradict him like that, especially with any question having directly to do with the gods.
"Ah, so," said Emperor Euphrates, nodding. "Not to kill unnecessarily,
I suppose, eh? But, of a truth, we all know that without shedding of
blood, there can be no sacrifice. According to the old legends, was not
Adam himself covered with an animal skin when he was banished from the
Garden of Eden? Surely, if this Invisible God—"
He paused, looking obliquely past Si'Wren, as if searching for some clue of more than passing significance, the better to pursue his unusual chain of logic.
'To be merciful,' Si'Wren wrote, remaining carefully apropos of his own words. Then she added, 'Kindness is better than cruelty.'
"You think so? But does not even this depend upon the circumstances? Foolish men must be punished, and what the gods declare must be carried out. Do you not agree?"
Si'Wren hesitated, and felt a great upwelling of truth that would no longer be quelled. She paused with marking sticks held poised in stilled fingers above the moist clay, and then made her first markings in its smooth freshness. What she was about to write would be rank blasphemy, but she could no longer contain herself.
'The smith', Si'Wren wrote, 'labors hard in the coals, using tongs. He pounds his many gods with endless hammerings, working by the strength of his arms. He is mortal, for he hungers, and his strength fails, and if he drinks no water he soon grows faint, yet he has created his own gods, which if they truly lived, would be battered witless anyways from the noise of hammer and anvil, even as they are shaped to make them ready to sell.'