besides with child, and cannot safely travel. My land is ripe for seeding. How can I go now?"

"There is wilderness to the south, where no son of the Mother lives," the Sarki said. "Go there. I care not for heathen who are out of my sight."

"Sir, show us mercy," Aaron said.

Kazunzumi danced his shoeless horse around to face Aaron. "Haruna, who was my friend, whom I thought to stand with me in Mother's light, I would be merciful; but I cannot be weak. It is not me whom you must beseech, but the Mother who feeds us all. Make amends to Her, then Sarki Kazunzumi will give his ear to your pleas. Without amends, Haruna, you must go from here within the week." Kazunzumi waved his arm and galloped off toward Datura. His servants followed quickly. On the roadside lay the gifts, dusted from the dirt raised by the horses.

The Amishman turned toward the house. Martha's face was at the parlor window, quizzical under her prayer-covering, impatient to hear what had happened. Aaron plodded back to the house with the evil news, stumbling over a clod of earth in the new-turned furrows near the road. Martha met him at the door. "Waas will er?" she demanded.

"He says we must leave our farm."

"Why for?" she asked.

"Somehow, I have offended their fadommt Mum-god," Aaron said. "The Sarki has granted us a week to make ready to go into the wilderness." He sat on a coffee-colored kitchen chair, his head bowed and his big hands limp between his knees.

"Stoltz, where can we go?" Martha asked. "We have no Freindschaft, no kin, in all this place."

Aaron tightened his hands into fists. "We will not go!" he vowed. "I will find a way for us to stay." He broke open the box of cigars that had been meant as a gift for Musa and clamped one of the black stogies between his teeth. "What is their heidisch secret?" he demanded. "What does the Mother want of me?"

"Aaron Stoltz," Martha said vigorously, "I'll have no man of mine offering dignity to a heathen god. The Schrift orders us to cut down the groves of the alien gods, to smash their false images; not to bow before them. Will you make a golden calf here, as did your namesake Aaron of Egypt, for whose sin the Children of Israel were plagued?"

"Woman, I'll not have you preach to me like a servant of the Book," Aaron 

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