First Section of "The Anchorite"

This is from a short story I'm working on, set in the same fallen world of the New Frontier, but focusing on people and places in the South, in what used to be the Texas Confederacy. Here's a snippet:

She doesn’t know her name. Her mother might have given her one, but she was dead long before any memory could survive. Her father never called her anything. He spoke only in commands — bring my meal, lay out my clothes, recite the twelve precepts, take the gifts out to the people. And now he was dead, too, and she was alone with her nameless self.

She didn’t mind. The people left their offering of food every morning at the little doorway beside the wide steps that led to the temple — far more than she could eat. She had her books, and her sewing. And every seventh day, she climbed the little stairway from her rooms to the hall of the statue, came forth between the massive pillars, descended the seventeen steps to the first landing, and gave the gift of life to the people. They stood or knelt around the edges of the murky pool below, and sometimes one or two would shout, “Thank you, my lady!” But never any other name.

She didn’t see it happen, her father’s death. Two nights ago, he simply never returned from his evangel. She sat and waited for him, hunger growling down deep, staring at the empty dishes on the little table, the aroma from the pot on the solar plate driving all thoughts from her mind — but she could not eat without him. The windowless room grew dark as night fell. She didn’t even dare to light a candle. At last, she fell asleep in her chair and dreamed of a glowing blue disk that told her secrets. It looked like the sacred tablets she distributed to the people, but it wasn’t until later that she recognized the similarity, and by then she could not remember any of what it had said to her. The acrid smell of burnt goat awoke her. She turned off the solar plate, filled the pot with water from the ewer to soak, and went to bed.

The following morning, when she went down to collect the offering, a note lay atop the basket. It entreated her to come to the dais. Not knowing what was expected of her, she dressed in full panoply, complete with headdress. Rain had fallen during the night, as usual, and her thin slippers got soaked before she made it down the first flight of steps, as usual. As she came to the edge, she looked out across the wide plaza toward the fallen obelisk, and the Capitol with its cratered dome peering through the mist at the far end of the pool. No sign of life. She only ever came here when the people came, too. The emptiness charged the air with a cold menace.

She made out a solitary figure trudging along the water from the tent city that ran up the little hill on the left toward the ruined House — an armigant, in his full array of bones and feathers. He came to a stop in the plaza before the pool. She couldn’t see his face, but there was youth in his manner, and she figured him for a corpal, new to the service. He shouted the news to her that her father had been stricken by the brain lightning, and would never return. By the quavering in his voice, she reckoned the veterans had foisted this unpleasant task on him, and he couldn’t say no.

She knew from her reading that she ought to weep and rail, like the daughters of the Elders from the scripts, but she merely thanked the man and climbed the stairs to the temple. She stood before the giant statue of the god on his throne. She told him the news, though, of course, he knew already. His huge eyes looked out through the pillared entrance over the sodden world, and saw all. His left hand, clenched in a fist, seemed to embody his displeasure. His right hand was missing, knocked off long ago in some blasphemic act. A compulsion gripped her, then. She made a hasty bow to the towering figure and almost ran to the little west door, up the six flights of metal stairs out onto the balcony. There, beneath the names of the fallen kingdoms before the Collapse — Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York — she looked out over the river at the pale sun, ghostlike behind the thinning clouds.

A starved longing gripped her, but like her, it had no name. It moaned to her across the tangle of trees and vines that boiled around the little town of Mall, but she could not understand its language. She would have called back, but even here, high up and far off, she feared that someone might hear her. Instead, she sighed — three counts in, three counts out — and returned to the residence. She took up her book. She had read it many times before — her father had written it when he was among the scribes at the enclave in Richmond, before she was born. It was called My Sixty Visions, and it laid out the first principles of his ministry (for which he had been banished to the road, at last arriving here to guide the people, thus realizing the thirty-fourth prophecy in the book).

He was a good writer, her father — his prose dense but lively — but she found it impossible to concentrate on the words. Her eye kept drifting toward the large glass wall that looked down into the Undercroft. Darkness poured out of the massive space like a flooding river, filling her mind with a cold blankness. She closed the book and went to bed, but didn’t sleep until the gray light began to filter in from the little entrance hall. 

The tolling of the gong awakes her, and she dresses carefully in her gown of pale green and white. She places the headdress with its spiked crown over her own dark hair. She takes the phials of little blue pills from the replicator, and places them in the basket. The supply is dwindling. Soon it will be gone altogether. She doesn’t know how to work the machine, or where to get the materials it needs to make the medicines. Her father had known all that, but never saw fit to tell her. She puts it out of her mind. It will have to wait for another day. She ascends to the temple, bows before the Emancipator, and passes out between the mighty pillars, onto the great stair, bringing her gifts to the people.