But the cult of the Phytotheos, as all things must that rise from unnotice to greatness, had roused enmity amongst its fellows, and the sectarians of other gods sought to encompass its destruction by despatching as annual sacrifice to its central shrine a herbicida seethed from earliest infancy in poisons most fatal to all manner of plants. Wherefor her caress could shrivel leaves; her breath unpetal blooms; and her kisses scar and slaughter trees. And ’twas intended that her strangled flesh, divided and subdivided, would unherb the shrine and shatter its cult’s prestige for ever, nor would her beauty avail aught, it was rightly judged, against men who recognized none such save in that which raised petal and leaf for their Master’s glory. Lily-like she was, but lily she was not, therefore they would slay and dice her compunctionless as each week they slew and diced fowl and each month oxen.
But the malice of the cult’s rivals came to naught after this wise:
When the girl was received, gold-chained at wrist and ankle in her shift of theta-broidered cotton, she was stripped, unchained, and lowered for bathing into a ritual tank of the shrine, ere being lifted forth, dried with fragrant straw, and blindfolded with flax for conduction to the chamber of sacrifice for vine-strangling. And so the sacrifice might have proceeded to its limit, had not a recent and nostalgic neophyte of the shrine, charged with updrawing the girl’s chains from the tank’s floor whereto they had been dropped mid-ritual, noted amid his wondering and sorrow at her death that the sun-shafted water, crowded on her lowering with green specks of a motile alga, was clear and lifeless, while the gold of the chains seemed brazen and verdigris’d in a general greening of the floor.
Wherefor he guessed her herbicidal nature and raised horrified voice in warning, running against all custom and precedent to the chamber of sacrifice, that he might interrupt and suspend the mortal rite with his tale. And when, this accepted as possible, the girl’s flesh was tested with common leaves and lesser flowers, pressed to her skin or held to her breath, his guess was proved to the limit: she was herbicida pur-sang, whose very tears, flowing on her reprieve, were mopped and sponged as sacrilegious. But the Phythierarchs were ruthless only in that which pertained to their Master’s service, and now released the inimmolanda, gifting her the chains she had borne, when their translated questions uncovered no complicity of hers in the plot, nor found falsity in the promises she made to seek out on release the herbless desert, wherein time would leach her unrenewed poisons to naught.