Free The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner Page B

and colorless, and he felt superior.
    “I am quite beautiful,” he said to Earth, “but you are very dull. The only pretty things about you are your lakes.” And he spent all his time looking into the water and would not speak to Earth. So Earth swept up the dust from the mountains and made snow and the dust from the valleys and made dark black soil, and in the soil she scattered the seeds for forests and flowers and covered herself with green trees and bright colors and told the Sky that she was as beautiful as he. But he had eyes only for the lakes, who reflected his own glory. They bore him children, who were the smaller rivers and streams.Earth was jealous and made trees grow up around each of the lakes, hiding them from the Sky’s view.
    The Sky was angry. He took up some of the black soil from Earth’s valleys and some of the snow from her mountains, and he mixed them together and blew hard and scattered them across the world. Every speck of dust grew into a human, some dark like the valley soil and some white as the snow. So, though we come from the Earth, we must thank the Sky for our creation, because it was the Sky that made man. But he was impatient and did not do such a job as the Earth would have done. Man came out small and weak and without the gifts of the gods. When the Sky sent men to clear the forest around the lakes, that he might see them, they were too weak to pull down the trees.
    Earth looked at them climbing through her forests and said, “Why have you made these?”
    And the Sky was ashamed, and he told her that he wanted to see the lakes, and the Earth was ashamed and said that she wanted the Sky to speak only to her. The Sky promised that he would look at the lakes only sometimes, and the Earth promised to hide only some of the lakes in the trees. And they were happy.
    But Earth watched the humans that the Sky had made and felt sorry for them. They were cold and hungry. So she gave them fire to make them warm,and she gave them seeds to scatter on the ground. She made animals for them to eat, but no matter what gifts she gave them the humans were ungrateful. They thanked only the Sky for having made them. The Earth grew angry and she shook with her anger, and the houses that the humans had built fell down and the animals that they had gathered were frightened and ran away, and the humans realized that they had made a terrible mistake. From then on there were always some humans who thanked the Earth for her gifts and some humans who thanked the Sky for their creation.
    When the magus was finished, the group of us sitting around the fire was quiet. Then Sophos asked, “The people in Eddis, do they really believe that?”
    I barked with laughter, and everyone looked at me. “In the city of Sounis do they really believe that the Nine Gods won the Earth in a battle with Giants? That the First God spawns godlets left and right and his wife is a shrew who is always outwitted?” I lifted the back of my head off the ground and crossed my arms underneath it. “No, they don’t believe that, Sophos. It’s just religion. They like to go up to the temple on feast days and pretend that there is some god who wants the worthless sacrificial bits of a cow, and people get to eat the rest. It’s just an excuse to kill a cow.”
    “You sound very learned, Gen. What do you knowabout it?” asked the magus.
    I sat up and moved to the fire before I answered him. “My mother was from the mountain country. It’s no different there. Everybody goes to the temple, and everybody likes to hear the old stories after dinner, but that doesn’t mean they expect a god to show up at their door.”
    “Oh?”
    “Yes,” I said, letting my tongue run away from me. “And you made a lot of mistakes. You aren’t even pronouncing the name of the country right. The people on the mountains call it Eeddis, not Eddis. And you left out the part where the Earth cries when the Sky God ignores her and turns the oceans to