The Birthgrave

1

To wake, and not to know where, or who you are, not even to know what you are—whether a thing with legs and arms, or a beast, or a brain in the hull of a great fish—that is a strange awakening. But after a while, uncurling in the darkness, I began to discover myself, and I was a woman.

All around was blackness and no sound. With my hands I felt old crusts of rock. There was an ancient bitter smell without a name pressing into my nostrils. I crawled out of the recess I had been lying in, and found a sort of passage where I could stand upright. Oddly, I did not wonder if I was blind. It was cold and airless as I felt a way along the passage. My foot struck hard on an obstruction. I kneeled and felt it carefully. A step, followed by other steps, hewn out roughly from the inner rock, and not much trodden. I could remember abruptly other staircases, made of smooth veined white stuff, slippery almost as glass, deeply indented at their center from countless feet passing up and down.

I went cautiously up the steps, feeling always with my hands. I did not think to count them, but there were many, at least a hundred. And then a flat space without steps. Foolishly I had quickened my pace, thankful to be on level ground, but I was punished. Suddenly there was no more stone in front, only an unsensable void. I swayed like a dancer on the brink of the invisible drop, then flung backward and saved myself. A skitter of stones fell down into the blackness. I heard them falling for a long time, bouncing often against the walls.

I was terrified now. How could I go on without seeing? The next mistake might be fatal, and already, without even knowing who I was, I knew my life was important to me. I sensed, too, something fighting against me in the dark, a malignant, one-sided battle, and I feared it and was angry.

On hands and knees I went forward very slowly, away to the left of the drop. After a moment, my outstretched hand clawed at emptiness. I turned back, going to the right. A few seconds, and the third corner of the abyss was sucking at my grasp.

I was filled with fury. I screamed out a curse in the dark, and the sound echoed and echoed until I thought the rock would split in pieces.

Where now? Perhaps there was nowhere. I lay on the ledge and wept, and then curled again, like an animal or a fetus, and slept. That was the end of my first awakening.

The second time was better. The original sleep had been no normal sleeping; this was, and I woke with a different awareness of things.

I reasoned in the dark that if the staircase ended in nothing, then I would have to go back down the stairs to the passage, and retrace my steps until I found some other way. It occurred to me then, for the first time, that I was seeking the surface, with an instinctive knowledge of being underground.

Crawling back across the platform to the stairs, my hands and then my knees encountered a square dip in the rock. I searched it and discovered a seam. This must be a door. Even while I was trying to find some way to open it, it slipped suddenly inward. I found myself, still in absolute blackness, hanging over another unguessable void, my scrabbling fingertips clutching at one smooth edge of the door. There was no hope. My fingers lost their grip and I fell. I thought that was the end of it, but the drop was not very far. I hit the stone floor, and rolled, loose-limbed enough that I did myself no harm.

I turned around slowly, and now, unmistakably, there was the merest glimmer of light, far off, at the end of what seemed another long passageway. Drawn by that light, I set off quickly, almost running.

Now I could see the dim outline of the rock sides, and the little veins of glitter in them. The passage wound and wound, and the glow deepened and bloodied. Then abruptly I had turned a corner and threw up my hands to shield my eyes.

The light was as blinding as the darkness, but soon I could rub away the tears and look around me.

I was in a vast cavern, lit only at its center where a great, rough-hewn bowl, at least six feet in diameter, poured out a ceaseless storm of red and golden flame. Beyond the fire a flight of steps ran up to a narrow door high in the wall. Otherwise the cavern seemed featureless and empty.

Somehow the narrow door was important to me, and I knew I must reach it.

I started out across the floor, suddenly aware of how the cavern, stretching up endlessly into darkness, dwarfed me like an ant. I passed the flame-bowl, had my foot on the first stair. There was a groaning thunder behind me. I swung around and looked in astonishment. Countless little fires had cracked open the cavern floor, and were blazing there. At the next step, fresh flames burst through. Not stopping to see any more, I ran to the top of the stairs, as if speed could outwit the mechanism below. With my hand on the narrow door, I glanced back. The floor where I had walked was now a sea of savage gold, and the scarlet smoke clouded up and turned to purple in the high roof. I pushed the door and ran through when it opened, thrusting it shut behind me.

The room was full of light, though it seemed to have no source. In front of me was a long hanging curtain, and when I pulled it aside, a stone altar and another stone bowl, where something stirred and brooded at my presence. I could not see this thing, only sense it, and when it spoke, I did not hear the words except with the ears inside my head.

“And so you could not sleep forever. I knew that you must wake one day, for all the sleep I gave you.

Wake, and come to me. Even the abyss could not take you, as I hoped. Well, then. I will tell you things.

I am Karrakaz, the Soulless One, who sprang from the evil of your race, a world of years before your birth, and finally destroyed that race, and everyone of it, except yourself. And you escaped destruction because you were a little child, and had not yet properly learned the ways of evil. But now you have grown to womanhood in your sleep, and you will learn. Evil will come and you will welcome it.

Remember, wherever you go, I will be near you. There is no escape from Karrakaz now. Look.”

On the altar something flickered and glittered and took on substance. A knife, with a sharp bright blade.

“See how easy it would be to be rid of me. Pick up the knife. You have only to tell it where to strike, and it will obey you. Then you can sleep forever, without fear.”

But I stood quite still and did not take it. A million pictures and memories were blazing through my mind, and my hands were icy with terror.

“You wish to go out, then? Easy. There is the way. The steps beyond the altar lead upward and out into the world. But if you go, you are cursed, and carry a curse with you; there will be no happiness. The civilization which bred you is dead uncountable years. Your palaces are in ruins. The lizards sun themselves in the dried-up fountains and the fallen courts. And you—I will show you to yourself.

Recollect, you should have been powerful, a magician who ruled the elements, the stars, the seas, the deep fires of the earth. All things might have done your bidding. The power of flight was yours, the chameleon art, the art of invisibility—and beauty. Let me show you what you are.”

The new thing in the air shone coldly clear, and in it I saw my reflection begin to form. A woman-shape, slender, small; long hair, very pale, and then the face—the hands of the reflection covered its face, and kept a little of its hideousness from me. But only a little. I knew. The face of a devil, a monster, a mindless thing, unbearable to look on.

I was crouching low against the floor, one arm over my head, my chin pressed down against my breasts, and, in the other hand, the knife from Karrakaz’ altar.

But before I could speak the death words to the blade, a soft lamp filled my brain, cool and green, and very old.

“Yes,” said the no-voice in my skull, “there is always that. If you can find it. Your soul-kin of green jade.”

I jumped up and flung the knife through the image of the mirror so that it shattered. Beyond the door a massive explosion rocked the cavern, and the floor juddered under my feet. I started for the steps.

“Wait,” it said, the he-she thing without a soul. “Remember you are cursed, and carry a curse with you.

You have been asleep in the depths of a dead volcano. Leave it, and it will wake as you have woken.

The red-hot lava will pour out through every passage and pursue you down the mountain. It will cover villages and towns, ruin crops, and burn to death everything living in its path.”

But I scarcely heard. My instinct for freedom was too strong, too terrible. I rushed up the steps, up and up, away from the glowing room and the possession there, into cold darkness that soon lightened. As I paused a moment to rest, leaning against the mountain’s gut, I looked up and saw stars and moonlight pouring in my eyes. Behind me the dark was reddening, and rocked with endless paroxysms of anger or pain. The stench of sulfur filled my belly and head and lungs and made me sick, but I toiled on, my hands like limpets on the stone. At last a ledge, and beyond the ledge the outer slopes of the volcano, running downward into dark valleys. Above, wide now from horizon to horizon, the brilliant sky.

I jumped from the ledge, and, as my feet touched soil, a demon belled in the earth. Sky and earth came toppling together and turned scarlet, and I fell, and continued to fall, down into the night.

2

I fell faster than I could have run, too stunned to be frightened yet. Then I was in a pit, and was stopped like a heart in death. I crawled out, gazed back. The clouds above the grumbling mountain were russet, and the first bright snakes of lava were sliding forth after me. A shower of boiling coals exploded outward, and fell all around me. Black-ash rain filled my eyes and mouth. I wrapped a corner of the dirty garment I wore over my mouth and nose, and fled again.

Down to the valleys. No longer dark. Lights were flying here and there and everywhere, and I could hear them screaming and shouting even over the noise the mountain made. There was no hope for them, for myself. Where would any of us hide from this burning demented hatred?

I was on a road, and scarcely noticed it. I bore away from the first village, ran across an orchard, where already the sparks of the volcano had started a fire. Vines were popping as they blazed. A flock of bleating, terrified sheep came plunging past and were gone.

I ran on. Where was my instinct taking me?

Something snapped with a clang; I stumbled and fell. A wicked little trap had bitten shut on the hem of my tunic, by some miracle missing my bare foot. I wrenched the tunic free, tearing it, and saw ahead the low glitter of water.

A palace pool, clotted with a cream of lilies and swans, dazzled behind my eyes, but the night was crimson now, and the mountain thundered. I got up and ran toward the water. The vines whipped around me. Through a gate, across a furrowed field, smoking in places. All the while, the coals burst over me. A million little blisters were forming on my body, but I scarcely noticed them. Suddenly through a thicket, against the ghastly sky, a long lake stretching wide, its glass changing to red, steaming where the hot things fell in it and went out.

Stumbling to the edge, I found several moored boats, little fishing canoes. Why hadn’t the fools in the villages run to these and saved themselves? I felt helpless anger at them, as I expertly pushed my boat out from the shore, using the long rough pole. I bore the guilt for everyone of them to die. And here was the means for them to live, ignored. Damn them, then, let them perish.

Deep on the heart of the lake, I watched through the night, the imperceptible dawn, while the fury of the mountain expended itself. Around me the water heaved and bubbled, the air was black, hot, and stifled with falling ashes. The sounds were of a great beast vomiting. I thought of the stone Karrakaz had used as its altar, consumed with all the rest, but I knew that that thing at least had survived. It would be always with me, an emblem of the waiting evil in my soul, a reminder of my hideousness, the curse upon me, and the easiness of death.

At last, a sort of twilight, green and lavender, with one last pulsing cloud above the volcano. I strained the boat across the water to the farthest shore, but even there the land was cinder-fields. In places the ground had cracked open, erupting stones.

I would have kept away from the cots and huts, but it was so difficult to tell now. Everything was down, trees smoldering in the path. A dead child lay on its face; dead birds had fallen from the air. I began to weep, running frantically in all directions to escape this evidence, but always seeing it. Had my sin come already? Even in my unconquerable desire to be free, had I begun to unlock darkness?

And now I seemed to be moving down a narrow alleyway between the ruined walls of little houses.

A corner, swerving sharply, and now an open place. There were about fifty or sixty people huddled together here, their backs to me, ragged and grimy as I was. The sight shocked me. I stopped. A little hot wind hissed through my hair.

And then they began to turn, singly, in groups, sensing me as a wild animal senses danger or food. Their cold reddened eyes fixed on my body, halted, and turned from my face. I wanted to put up my hands to hide my face, but they were wooden and nailed against my sides. A child began to cry somewhere in the throng. Men shouted and women muttered. Their hands were moving as mine could not, in some ancient ritual; against evil, I thought. Suddenly a new voice rang out, clear, but with a little crack in it.

“The Goddess! The She-One from the Mountain!” And all about me, as if at a signal, they were falling on their knees, entreating me for mercy, and pity, and succor, and all the things I could not give. Mixed in with their wailing was a cry about their sins, and the word Evess. It came to me abruptly that they were speaking in some language I had never heard, and yet I knew every syllable. Evess meant face, but not in the human sense. This was the face of holiness which to them could be both beautiful and ugly, equally terrible, and must never be looked on. Glancing behind them, I saw what they had been grouped around at the end of the open place: a rough-hewn stone, resembling a woman in a red robe with white clay hair.

It held a mask against the Evess, which could not be seen, but the hair and stature of it were unmistakable. These people were big and large-boned, dark-skinned and black-haired. The image was not of them, but they and I knew it at once. It was myself.

So I stood facing myself across the humped hills of their bodies. I, who had brought the scarlet death of the mountain, worshiped in fear as the ancient goddess some legend had implanted in their minds.

I ended the paralysis of my bewilderment by turning to walk away.

Softly, whispering their invocations, they followed me. What now? If I broke into a run to escape them, would they too run to keep up? My eyes grew strange, and everywhere I looked, I seemed to see the glitter of the Knife of Easy Dying. Die, and let them follow me into death if they would. But I was still too new to life to let it go. Finally, sick and weary and in pain, I sat down on the rubble of some wall. I sighed, and countless eyes lifted, hovered, and fell away.

A woman came crawling to my foot.

“Spare us who have seen, unwilling, the Evess of the Goddess.”

“Let me alone,” I said, but too faint for her to hear the words.

She took it as some kind of malediction; perhaps I had not even spoken in their tongue, but in my own, consciously forgotten, yet learned in my first years as a child, before the ending of my race. She began to wail, and beat her breasts, and rend her hair.

“Stop,” I said.

She gazed at me blankly, her hands suspended in midair.

A callous hysteria overcame me, and I laughed weakly at her, at all of them, as I sat on the rubble.

They thought me a goddess. I was quite incomprehensible to them. No need then to explain, only do as I wanted. There would be no hindrance.

I got up, and every joint seemed ready to crack open.

An old long low building, upright, with several shallow steps, and an oblong doorway leading into cool dark. There was a smell there—cold yet close, not unpleasant, but alien. The smell of Human Life, and of something else too. I guessed soon enough when I saw the repeated image of the She-One. This was their temple, and the smell was holiness, fear and incense blended together by generations of unquiet belief.

They were hesitating below the steps, dark against the bronze and lilac sky. I held up my hand, my palm facing out toward them.

“No farther,” I said. “Mine.”

They seemed to understand. I went into the gloom alone. Beyond the altar, a screened door: the ultimate sanctuary. It was only a little cold stone room. Ash had collected on the floor, as it seemed to have collected everywhere. A priest’s pallet lay in a corner. I stumbled to it and lay down.

Would they come now, dare the abuse of a deity, realizing I was not a legend, but something much worse? Would they creep through as I slept, slide by the carved screen, bury a knife or a fire-sharpened pole in my left breast, and so through into my heart? If I slept ... would they come then ... ? I slept.

A vast palace, with golden rooms and crystal rooms and rooms of fire, and great staircases leading up and down. Like a mirage in a desert, surrounded by its fantasy of gardens. Half recalled, my home no longer standing now but hammered flat by time, by decay. What I had missed. The staircases wound up and up, and changed. Narrower, black now instead of white, black pillars and an oval doorway. Beyond it, a miasmic beauty, something flickering on a block of stone, out of a stone basin. The power of my race, the fount of knowledge and evil. Karrakaz, grown like a rare plant from the stagnant badness of generations of wicked and unthinking men and women. A flower created by poison, that had poisoned, in its turn, what had created it.

This was memory more than dream, but because it came as dream everything was nebulous, yet strangely intense, with an intensity only unreality could possess. An ornament, a flick of flame, sprang into blazing relief, and a man’s face—father, brother, what kin I did not know—haunted the winds and turnings of the palace. Waking, I could not recall it—only narrow, high-set eyes, like chips of his dark soul, looking coldly at me.

An instant before I woke, I saw the Jade.

The evil one had told me, in the mountain, of this green smooth thing that held some link with my innermost being. I did not understand, only trembled to repossess it, stretching out my hands to it, entreating. But my fingers closed on nothing, and with a great wrenching, I was flung back out of sleep into the world of the broken village, the temple, and despair.

It was dawn, and very quiet. Night had come and gone without a knife or sharpened pole. I went to the screen and looked beyond it. The main body of the temple was quite empty of anything except its own blue dusts. But in the doorway, on the floor just inside the threshold—I went to it and found a glazed clay bowl of milk, fruit and cheese in a dish. A piece of cloth lay folded beside them, dark red as old blood.

I did not want to touch this garment, though I was not sure why, but I bent and lifted it, and found a long loose tunic in my hands, and under that, left behind on the floor, a painted and enameled mask. The white face stared up at me. The eye-holes were painted around thickly with black stuff, the mouth was scarlet.

The curved open nostrils were rimmed with gold, and little golden drops hung in clusters at each side where ears might have been if the mask were a face.

So, their goddess must cover her deadly visage, the Evess so terrible to look on.

I took all the things into the priest’s room, and began to eat. I had not been aware of hunger until this moment. I think perhaps I could have lived indefinitely without food, sustained by the same weird process which had kept me alive inside the mountain. Now this first meal was oddly unpleasant, and afterward several demons rose up in my abdomen and chest, and lashed at me with their red-hot irons.

I lay down in agony, and, as I lay there, I heard a chant begin outside. On and on it went. They called for their goddess as she writhed in the priest’s room, and then was quiet in the lazy aftermath of pain.

Eventually, I got up. Without thinking if it were right, I slipped off my garments, and put on the tunic they had left me, and then the mask, which was fixed by hooks behind the ears.

I went out slowly and looked at them.

A sea of people, crouching as before. On the lowest step a bowl of incense smoked over a brazier.

Their terrible, almost unhuman faces lifted and fastened on mine, now free to their gaze.

“Goddess!”

“Goddess! Goddess!”

I felt their demand before they made it. I felt their grasping fingers on my soul.

Then a woman was coming up the steps, slowly, holding out the bundle in her arms.

“Take him. Oh, Great One, be merciful—save him—”

Over her head I saw the shadow of the volcano, the red dish cloud still throbbing there like a wound of fire in the sky.

The baby was almost dead, blue-faced, making little sick retching noises and trying to cry. All around the ruined village stretched and yawned. There was a distant smoke pall near the lake. They must be burning bodies there.

She thrust at me with her child, weeping.

I felt nothing.

“Save him,” she whispered. “My son—”

In anger my hand went out to push her away. My palm slapped against the child, and at once it vomited, black vomit, ashes from the volcano, and its face turned pink, its eyes blazed open, and it began to scream and wail, not the feeble voice of the dying, but the healthy fury and terror of new life.

The woman gasped and almost fell down. Her eyes exploded tears. A man came running up, flung his arms around both of them. Their mouths chanted prayers to me, but every sense in them was fastened on their child, to see, to touch, to feel it live.

Like a tide they broke against me then, begging to be cured of their ills, their pains. Hundreds of men and women it seemed, pressing close. Their smell was of the earth, of the smoke, of sweat, of fear. I touched them, feeling nothing, no power go out of me, no ecstasy of giving, no joy in what I did that brought so much joy. They brought a blind man, who pulled my fingers to his eyes, and saw. They brought a girl, shrieking in agony with a pain in her side, and when my hand was laid against the pain, she was still and beautiful again with peace.

It ebbed at last. I showed them my palm, outward, my own demand for privacy, and they shrank away, their voices singing. Into the priest’s room I went, and threw the screen close against the door, and here I screamed and beat my hands against the stone walls until they bled and every nail was broken. How like a prison the room seemed to me, and, even then, I did not realize why.

3

Three days I lay in the room, not eating what they left for me at the temple door, often sleeping, dreaming sometimes, my eyes wide white jewels behind the mask which I must never take from my face until the Jade lay cool between my fingers.

On the fourth day, there was a hum outside like bees. I went out then, and found a vast crowd of strangers eddying in the street. As I came there, there came also a concentration, and congealing. Soon it was no longer many, but one single thing which waited there for me. For miles around, from every ruined village, farm, town, and steading, they had flocked to me, bringing their sores and burns, entreating my blessing. I, the Goddess of Death, who had justly sent the wrath of the volcano against them for their wickedness, would help them now to make better their lives, that they might serve my shrine.

I touched them and they healed. And then there were more, new faces and sores, and these I healed too.

When the streets were emptv, and the steps empty of all but their gifts, I went in and lay down to sleep again, until eventually the noise would call me up once more. It was like a poisonous wound, from which the pus must be eased, but in which the pus reformed, gradually, after each easing, until at last it must be eased again.

Then came a long time, five dawns, five twilights, when there was no sound. I lay still, listening, my eyes wide. I lay, like an insect in chrysalis, awaiting some wrenching calamity to break my cocoon, and turn me out, half-formed. I was still not a living creature. I was a sleeping silent thing, without substance or true life.

Then life came, but wrongly, not as I would have wanted if ever I had been allowed to plan.

There was a great crash of sound: something thrown aside at the temple door, the gifts of untouched food, perhaps. There were steps, brutal, tearing the quiet of the place. I heard and smelled unfear. No terror in this one who sought me, only a raw, uneasy anger.

“Come out, you she-beast!” a man’s voice shouted.

It seemed to burst the temple walls, and break inside my head in brass pieces, that voice which had no fear, the first human voice that had no fear of me.

I got up, summoned irresistibly. I stood by the screen, and already my heart was moving, pounding as it had when I fled from the volcano, although now I ran toward the fire, and not away.

Then the great hand of the voice was on the screen, and the screen was thrown aside, little bits of the lattice snapping against the floor. He was ready to seize me next, fling me aside, my little bones snapping like the ivory. But he was still. No fear perhaps, but ingrained superstition. They had worshiped the She-One, each from birth, and now he seemed to see her here—red robe, white hair, like the red-hot, white-hot spew of the mountain, and the mask, so terrible because it said nothing but “I am here.”

Under the deep tan of endless sun, his face paled slightly. His lips drew back from tiger-teeth, wolf-teeth, snarling white. He was so much larger than I, taller, great bones, a big spare frame, beautiful and alien in its masculinity. Yet our looks seemed level. Long curling black hair ran down from his head to his shoulders like the black wool of a ram. He wore no mask but his face shook me through and through in a way I could hardly bear, for this face, this seen face, was the face in my dream—long, male, with high-set, narrow, black-chip eyes.

He cleared his throat. His tongue darted on his lips to moisten them, and we stood, each one half in the other’s power, and my sex stirred in me, and woman stirred in me, and an ancient humanity I had not known was mine.

And then he made himself move. His hand closed on my shoulder, hurting and immediate. In the other hand came a dull, sharp hunting knife.

“Well, bitch, and who are you?”

I said nothing. I looked at him, drinking him to quench the surge of life burning up in me, which was not quenched but only burned the brighter.

“You don’t make me quake, bitch. Some healer-witch from a cave in the mountain, eh? Come to live off their charity because they’re fools and afraid?” His hand reached into my hair and pulled it hard. “Hair of an old woman, but not the body of one. And your face, behind this mask—what?”

His dislike washed over me, his contempt curdled in the pit of my belly, and if this was all I was to have of him, then I made it welcome. But his fingers touched the hook of the mask, and I recalled my face—the face Karrakaz had given me. I pulled back. I put up my hand, palm flat against his chest.

“To see my face is death to you,” I said.

His skin burned against my palm; I felt the heartbeat start up under my touch. He ripped my hand away from him, took a step back.

“Very well, healer-woman, hide your plain little looks. And stay here if you want. But no more food, and no more worship. If you want bread, you can work for it. Help us build their homes again, help us salvage what we can in the fields. Help their women give birth to replace what the mountain took from them. Otherwise, starve.”

He turned to go.

I said: “You who were not here when the fire came, where were you then? On the far road, bandit, killing for gold and food. That then was your work. Out of the place that birthed you, without a care for it until the light of the red lava brought you back, hard with your guilt, and cruel with your shame.”

I did not know how the words came, or why, till I had spoken, but he looked around at me again, and his face was white now, the rims of his eyes red, and his nostrils flared on anger and pain, and I knew I had read him accurately and to the last letter.

“So someone whispered to you of Darak, the gold-fisher. Don’t mouth it at me and think you can scare me with it. I’ve told you what’s for you, and there’s the end of it.”

He went from the temple with great strides, his hands clenched, and now I knew my prison very well.

Now I could go.

I was free. No more gifts to me of food, and no more entreaties. He had stopped all that. There was activity and work outside. Once there was screaming, and the noise of things falling just beyond the temple door—some women daring to go against his order.

I had not eaten now for nine days, and felt no hunger or any particular weakness.

I could steal out by night, to be sure no one would see me; I could run across the endless country to the sea, and let them forget their goddess, and let Darak forget her too.

But now that I could go, I would not go at all. I was chained by the roots of my senses like a bitch-dog to a post.

How well Karrakaz had trapped me here, and kept me from all knowledge of where I must walk, and what must be done to free myself. First by the need of these people, now by my need. And if all my powers were dead in me as Karrakaz had said, how had I healed? How? Or had they healed themselves by their own belief in me? It was their hands which had snatched mine. And I seemed to remember a book with an open page:

“Master,” cried the woman, “heal me, for I am sick as you see.” And he said: “Do you believe that I can do this thing?” And the woman wept and said: “Yes, if you will.” “Then, as you believe, so be it,” he said, and went away, not even touching her. And she was healed at once.

The tenth day. Outside: noise, hammering, shouting, sound of moving logs of wood, a work-gang singing. At midday a bell beating to summon who would to a communal meal. Darak and his men had organized things very well it seemed.

Then a great crunching of feet, laughter, voices. After that, quiet. A vast, warm noonday quiet, and a slow, still yellow heat.

I crossed the floor to the doorway of the temple, and stood there. The village was a different thing, caged in places by scaffolding, here and there rebuilt and half-patched with tiles. Far up the street a rough wooden shelter, a brass bell—pulled from some temple roof presumably—swinging a little on a pole outside. A cow wandered lazily in the sunshine. Otherwise, the place was empty. Darak had called them to some council then, on the low hill beyond the houses. Yes, that would be it. A little king on a little throne, lording it because his subjects were smaller even than his smallness.

My eyes slid to the volcano. Dark pinnacle, without a cloud. Asleep again, sated, terrible for all that. A black two edged sword waiting in the sky, to let fall its red blows on the back of the land, whenever its passion moved it. There then, is the king, Darak.

A darting movement, snake’s-tongue flicker over rock.

A woman hurried across the open space before the temple, casting an indigo shadow. A man stirred uneasily in a doorway, holding a stave, looking up the road to where the people had followed Darak.

“Help us!” cried this woman. “Our three children are sick, and the doctor from Sirrain has said they’ll die.

I couldn’t bring them—they screamed when I tried to move them.”

I looked at her closely. She was no more than twenty years. Perhaps I was her age. But she looked old, her young face creased into lines, her hair faded by the sun.

“Quickly, Mara,” the man hissed from across the street.

“Please,” she said.

“Do you believe the goddess can cure your children without seeing them?”

“Yes—oh, yes—”

“Then believe I can, and they will be cured.”

Her face changed, the lines smoothed out, ripples running from a pool.

There was noise from the hill.

“Mara!” the man cried. , She turned to run with him.

“Wait,” I said. They stopped, nervous, anxious not to offend either Darak or myself. “Tell whom you wish,” I said, “whoever invokes my name, believing in it, can cure or be cured of any sickness. There is no longer any need to come to me.”

They made obeisance to me, blessing me, then ran like frightened mice.

Dust billowed down the street. The crowd was coming back, noisier than ever. There had been wine up on the hill. A small shrine there, perhaps, some old sacred meeting place Darak had thought would impress them.

There was a stone bench set at the top of the temple steps. I sat on it, waiting.

The cow ran down the street first in fright, lowing indignantly. Then came men, talking, impatient, grasping wineskins, followed by groups of women. Darak’s people were easily spotted. They were better dressed than the villagers, and more gaudy. Leather boots with tattered silk tassels, silk shirts, scarlet and purple. Belts with iron studs, gold rings, fringes on the jackets—torn like the tassles, not so much from wear as from hard fighting. Mostly they were men, but five or six girls slithered by with them, dressed like them for the most part, but with several ounces more gold around their necks, fantastic earrings, and jet-black hair, roped through with ribbons and flowers. This seemed enough. I wanted to go in, almost drunk from the sight of them, but I waited for him as I had known I would. When he came he was thoughtful, discontented, sullen. Whatever he had sought on the hill had not come to him.

More quietly dressed than the others, the two girls, one on either side of him, made up for it. They were incongruous. Their hair was a kind of parody of a court woman’s—elaborate, but too unruly to be kept in place. It stood up on their heads in hills, in plaited ropes, in twists and loops, transfixed by the blades of gold combs and jasper pins. The one nearest to me had wound pearls in and out like a pale snake trail.

Strands had unfurled onto their shoulders where they tangled in the masses of goldwork. Their dresses were silk, one crimson, one black and yellow, and under the fringed and embroidered hems were the boots of bandit-bitches, covered with muck and filth and dust.

My eyes were moving away from them to Darak, impatient. No one had seen me yet as I sat in the shadow of the door-mouth. Then I saw what hung from the throat of that pearl-haired, crimson girl. A tiny green and cool shining thing on a gold ring and chain. Jade.

I got up before I could think, my hand went out, and I shouted at her.

The whole procession stopped, stumbled around, stared at me. I did not see their expressions, only sensed them, my eyes pinned to that green cool thing between her brown bitch’s breasts.

There was silence, and then he said: “Bow to your goddess, people. Ask her to do a few tricks for you to earn her bread.”

It was very still then. The hot raw day hung close. I did not look at his face, only at the face of the girl with the jade. She grinned, raised her eyebrows, one after the other, then spat on the ground before the steps. But her eyes were tight.

I went down the steps very slowly, and I was trembling. I stood a few feet from her, and pointed to the green thing without speaking.

She laughed, and spat again. Then looked at Darak.

“What is it you want, witch? You can’t eat a green hard stone.”

“Give it to me,” I said to the bandit girl.

She made her fear into anger.

“Keep off. It isn’t yours. It’s mine. He gave it to me.”

“Not yours. He stole it. Mine, now. Give it to me.”

In spite of herself, the girl shrank away, back against his body.

“In our camp,” Darak said softly, “if one of us wants something from another, we fight for it. For food, or gold, or a knife, or a woman. Or a man. Shullatt here fought for me. And I took her. You want the green stone, you can fight her too. Shullatt’s not afraid.”

Shullatt’s eyes altered. Her courage was back. She was on her own ground again. Another moment and she would have me under her, her cat claws in my eyes, hammering my breasts with her hard elbows. I would rather fight a man than a woman. Another moment—I could not wait. My hand went out. The jade leaped into my fingers. I tugged and the chain broke.

Like cool water in my palm, the jade lay sleeping but alive.

Her moment was over, but still she moved. With my other hand I caught her hard and stinging across the whole face. Blood jetted from one nostril as she reeled backward. Darak might have steadied her. but did not bother. She went down by his feet and screamed curses at me without getting up.

Abruptly Darak smiled grimly, set the toe of his boot against the girl’s side, and quite gently kicked her.

“Be quiet,” he said. “You’ve lost the stone. She fought you for it, in her own way.”

Someone began crying and shouting. Heads turned. I could not see who it was, but I heard the voice of the woman.

“She saved my children! The doctor from Sirrain told me they’d die—but they’re alive! She made them live!”

Darak’s face set hard and contemptuous. He too spat, and turned down the street to a side alley, pushing the crowd out of the way. His bandits shouldered after him, and the girls ran to keep up. The murmuring was growing all around. I went up the steps and into the temple before they could move about me and close me in.

I pulled the broken screen against the door opening, and lay on the pallet, on my side, my knees drawn up, my hands under my chin, and against my lips the green smooth thing that was made mine, and seemed like a beginning.

Night came and blackened the world, and red stars ripped their places in the sky. I would go tonight, out, across the wide lands. Nothing mattered but the green promise. Even Darak seemed nothing at that dark twilight. But then the need of food came, unexpectedly, and with it nausea at the thought of eating, and the shrinking from the inevitable pain that would come after, and torture and slow me, and keep me from going away. How long had it lasted before? An hour, or two perhaps? Not so bad. I could bear it because I must. But it was ten days now I had not eaten.

I went out onto the steps.

A few lights flickered in open windows, in ruins, in rebuilt rooms, many in the wooden shelter Darak had had put up for the homeless. Food smells from there, thick and musky. I went that way.

Inside the narrow door fires were burning in stone rings or in iron braziers, and yellow lamps swung overhead. A big carcass was turning on a rough spit, crackling and stinking. The villagers were crowded close as if they liked this nearness to one another. Darak was not there.

As I went in, the accustomed first silence slipped over them. They slid into the grooves of it with stealthy ease. I walked up the center aisle, between the fires and cook-pots. Every bit of food that I passed made me sick, but I found a caldron bubbling in a corner, and the smell of this did not repulse me so much.

“What is this?” I asked the girl bending over it, poised now, her mouth ajar at the sight of me.

“Broth,” she stammered, “vegetables—”

“Will you give me some?”

She jumped around, beckoned, and a child came running up with a ladle and wooden bowl. Watched by the countless fixed eyes of the people in the shelter, and the swaying gold eyes of the lamps and candles, the girl began to fill the bowl with the ladle, once, twice—

“Enough,” I said. I took it, and thanked her, and at that moment a big hand knocked the bowl from my grasp, and the girl shrieked.

“Did Darak not tell you to give no food to the witch, slut?” a voice growled, guttural and menacing.

The girl took a step back. But the bandit’s interest was no longer centered on her.

“So, the immortal goddess, who sleeps for centuries under the mountain, still needs to fill her belly, eh?

Darak told us you’d come here, and he said, when you came, to take you to him.”

I looked at the bandit through the eye-holes of the mask.

A blank unimpressionable face. He knew their legend even, but had not been reared on it, as Darak had.

I had no chance with this one.

I said: “If Darak Gold-Fisher has need of the help of the goddess, he has only to ask. I will come with you.”

The bandit grunted and swung out, leaving me to follow.

“Forgive us,” the girl whispered.

I touched her forehead with my finger, gently, as if in blessing, feeling nothing, while her face flooded with color and gratitude. Then I followed my captor.

He took me along the dark close alleys, telling me which path to follow now, and walking behind me.

Here most of the buildings were flat. We passed a marketplace with broken sheep pens, and a burned tree like a huge stick of charcoal at the center. I began to hear music then, savage, bright music, instinctively tuneful and rhythmic, but with no pattern beyond an underlying beat of drums. There was a slope where a large house had stood, facing out over the lake, toward the mountain. Only one court remained, and here, in the hot early darkness, Darak’s people were eating around their own fires, playing this hill music, chipping crudities into the stone walls.

The bandit pushed me through a low arch. Paving lay under my bare feet, still warm. Bones and apple cores were scattered about, with a dog or two nosing around them hopefully. A girl with ink hair was dancing, stamping her feet and turning in endless circles, the golden bracelets on her arms like the fire-rings of some blazing planet.

At the far end, seated on a striped rug, like the hill-king he was, Darak looked up. A few men sat around him, and there was a girl—suitably placed far down the low table. I recognized her, the other who had come from the hill with him, in black and yellow silk.

The bandit began to prod and push me with fervor now. We arrived at the table—an intriguing item, over-carved from some light wood, certainly stolen, obviously kept as a symbol of Darak’s wealth, power, and good taste.

Darak smiled courteously.

“The goddess finally feels hungry,” he remarked. “Sit here, then, and eat.”

“I cannot eat in the sight of others,” I said.

“Of course, your holy mask. Then take it off.”

“No one must see my face. Do you not recall that, Darak?”

My voice, so cold and clear was the last of my strength. I was weakening now, frightened and angry and bewildered. The stench of food and drink came all around me, and there seemed no escape.

“We’re not afraid, goddess.” He stopped looking at me to peel a fruit. For all his lounging here, he was not a man who liked to be still. I wished him dead, but not hard enough. “Come, goddess. We can tell what you’ve got to hide. You’re albino—white hair, white face. Eyes too—although the mask holes throw a good shadow over them there’s no color. So. No more pretense. Sit and eat.”

He gave a little nod of his head; I almost did not see. But the big brute behind me giggled like a child, and the finger tips brushed my hair, coming for the hooks of the mask.

No, by all of my lost soul. They should not have my shame as a present in their stinking den.

I ducked under his hand, spinning around. My foot, the long toes clenched inward like a fist, kicked up and jabbed home in his groin. No compunction. I had seen what these things, half animal, used their genitals for, beyond the true purpose, and I was arrogant still with a raw and uncompassionate arrogance. He yelped and doubled and fell over, and I knew I had done enough to him.

I turned back to Darak, and he looked surprised.

“Well,” he said, and stopped.

I grasped the second before it was too late, to throw him now while he was unbalanced in front of his horde.

“You are the leader of these people,” I said to him, “and you have a right as such. I will show you what no other man may look on. Privately. Then you can judge for yourself.”

I felt sick when I had said it, sick and sad, and ashamed already. But I knew what must be done.

After a moment he grinned.

“An honor, goddess, to be shown privately what no other may look on.”

Some of them guffawed, and made their various absurd children’s jokes about the sexual act.

One leaned to Darak and said urgently: “Let some of us come with you. Don’t trust the bitch.”

Darak rose and stretched. The big muscles cracked and slid under his bronze skin.

“The day Darak is afraid to go into the trees with a girl, you can get yourselves a new leader.”

He came over to me, got my wrist, and took me out of the courtyard, taking great strides so that I stumbled and had to run to keep up. They laughed behind us, all except the man I had kicked, who was groaning and weeping on the ground.

We came into the terrible dead land near the lake. Great stretches of burned trees, brittle but still standing, where the night wind snapped twigs, and blew off a fine black powder in our faces. Only the water seemed clean. A moon was rising, red, and blurred at one edge as it melted into its wane.

In a way I was surprised he had not pushed me over and had me as soon as we came into the terrible trees. He was a hot hardness beside me, a little afraid without properly knowing it, sexually excited, I sensed. He still had my wrist, and now I pulled away.

“Is here far enough for the goddess?” he asked with stinging politeness. I wondered if he would ask next, equally biting and conscientious, should he spread his cloak for me?

“No,” I said, “a little farther. There is a place for all things, and this is not that place.”

I went on ahead now, toward the shore. I recalled the great sharp stones I had seen lying there.

My feet in the cinders, the water ahead of me, I said to him: “Look around us. Make sure there is no one here.”

“You look, goddess,” he said. “Your immortal eyes should be better than mine.”

So I looked. Then I crouched down, beckoned him to do likewise, spreading my hand as if to steady myself, and finding, without my eyes, a stone so perfect I might have planted it here purposely. My right hand was on the hook of the mask, and he watched, fascinated despite himself, the old rotten superstition overcoming him again. He was breathing fast, his eyes on mine, and my left hand jumped forward and the stone struck him on the forehead near the temple. It should have been a blow hard enough to kill, but perhaps I was off-balance myself, as I had made sure he should be; and besides, he knew in the last instant, and tried to throw himself aside, and he was very quick and strong. In any case, it was hard for me to kill Darak, and he meant more to me than my anger would let me know.

So the blow was a bad one. It stunned him and did not kill, and he fell sideways, and his lashes were very long on his high cheekbones, and I got up and ran from him, in every sense like a hunted cat, scrambling, into the dark.

But somehow the stone was still in my left hand. I could not seem to let go of it, and this slowed me. I was uncertain why I clung to it, but I think I knew he would come after me, and then I must defend myself again. And so it seems I slowed myself by holding it, so he could catch up to me, at the same instant ready to fight him when he did.

This double impulse clouded my mind, and worse, my hunger was on me like a beast. Weak-kneed and light-headed, I found at last I was stumbling along not far from the water’s edge, making back toward the volcano. Once I realized this I checked, panting, turned to the side, and tried to scale the slope there. I should be well away from the village by now. But the cinders and loose topsoil and shale gave under my feet. I slipped and slithered, clawing with my free hand, making so much noise I did not hear the steps behind until it was almost too late. When I heard, I turned, and he was there.

“Come here, damn you!”

His voice slit the night wind. I lost my foothold, letting go the hard-won ground, and fell back, grazed and breathless, a few feet away from him. The bruise was rising like an angry star on his forehead, and his eyes were black with fury. He staggered on his feet, still concussed, but I had done him little damage all in all. He cursed me, some curse of his hill men I did not recognize except in essence, and then he came at me, and I was on my feet, the stone grasped in my left hand, the sharpest end toward him. He stopped still a moment, coughing a little from the run we had had through the cinder dust; then his hand, too, was no longer empty. It was a wicked-looking knife, thin but strong, with metal bits welded on and sticking out like thorns from the middle of the blade.

We moved around each other, both nervous, at a loss, each again half in the other’s power. And then he recalled that he was Darak, and a man, and that I—mere woman—was something to be conquered and beaten down and back into my eternal submission, not worthy of his knife, and he swung at me with his other arm, and his empty hand struck me across ribs and belly, and that was that.

I lay under the reeling black sky that circled on its crow’s wings closer and closer, the stone a million miles from my hands, and my hands a million miles from my brain.

I remembered enough to shut my eyes as he pulled the mask of the She-One from my face.

Time passed.

I opened my eyes at last, and I think I had lost hold of consciousness a few seconds, for he was sitting some way off, his back half-turned to me, and I had not heard him leave me, or felt him drop the mask onto my breasts.

He was breathing deeply. I could not see his face properly to read it. I turned my head toward the stone, and it lay so near to me now, I thought it must have moved itself. Then it changed, and was the knife that Karrakaz had shown me, the knife that would always be there for me, so I might end my life. And I knew I could tell it to strike into me, and it would; and death would be a comfort. But my lips were stiff and my mouth was full of dust. I could not call to it.

Then he said: “This village has always made me angry. I only remember the beatings I got here as a child, but I always come again to take the fresh blows on my back. So I came again and tried to help them, and they called to you and invoked your name. Let them go, then.”

After that he was quiet for a little while. The wind stirred the lake softly, and the cinders with a sound of dry leaves.

“You,” he said eventually. “I don’t know what you are—a human perhaps, but not of this race. Not of man or woman. Not even of beast. Yes. A goddess, perhaps.”

I put the hooks of the mask behind my ears. The jade I had hung around my neck lay in an icy drop over my heart. I got up and turned away, and began to walk toward the flatter land beside the lake, where I could climb free, and go where I wished.

When he called to me, I wanted to turn and would not, and when again he called, I did not want to, and I did.

He stood some yards from me, and said, “Leave the village. Come into the hills with us. I’d like to deprive them of you, the mewling fools. You can heal, I know it. Heal my people. I’ll see you’re fed, and clothed—better than that.”

In his face there was a sort of fear, and it was his own fear that fascinated him. He wanted to explore it, not run from it. I saw the great strength in him then, a man who could look into himself, and look again and again.

And he had looked into my face—my hideousness.

And I loved him with my body, without much hope or much demand in me; and I despised him, and I knew that he would trap me, and there could be no true mating between us, of flesh, of thought, or of soul.

And I knew I would go with him.

1

On the second day into the hills, the mountain was a shadow, left behind. On the third, over many slopes, I could no longer look back and see it.

This was a strange open land, high up and near the sky. The hills rolled, dingy-brown, patched with purple gorse and blood-red flowers. Outcrops of rock showed like ancient bones pushed through the soil, and in the skull-holes of caves things stirred—bears, foxes—making their stores ready for the lean months. It was late summer. Already the sap was burning out of the year.

Darak’s band was not a large one—about twenty men. The main camp lay ahead in the hill’s heart. A few village boys had run away with us, anxious to leave the fields for easy pickings on the wide road and cart-tracks south. The men rode shaggy hill ponies, small barrel-chested mounts, hung all over with tassels, bells, gold coins, and lucky charms. The women had a couple of mules between them, and some times rode pillion with their particular bandit. Darak rode a black horse, fine and hot-tempered, unsuitable for the climbing, that shied every time a bird rose from a thicket. He went on something different, I thought, when it was a matter of business.

As a woman, I should have walked. As a witch, I had my own mule, brought from some village stable.

The red tunic of the goddess was gone, and the goddess’ white mask. I wore dark stuff now, and a face covering—the shireen Darak had seen among women of the plains tribes, whose faces must be hidden from puberty. Across forehead and eyes the cloth was close fitting, with narrow eye-holes decorated by their own raised upper lids, which cast a shadow over the eyes themselves. From the cheeks, over the nose and mouth and chin, hung a loose veil of the same material. A woman in the village had stitched it for Darak.

When I had ridden out with them, the villagers had stood in the streets, among the rubble, staring at me, sullen, and afraid that going I took something from them. Darak grinned, riding his black devil horse. A few women plucked at me, crying. I hardly understood them, my ears closed to their village tongue. They were nothing to me, but what then was Darak’s hill camp? There was a weight of iron in my belly, but it lifted as we left the lake and the volcano behind.

He had not spoken to me since the night on the cinder slope. All his words had come secondhand, from the mouths of others: “Darak says you are to have this,” “Darak has told me to tell you.”

At night, when he made camp, leather tents went up, painted with five or six colors. One of these was given to me, and here I could be as private as I wished. I ate a little when I must, and the pains grew easier, but never failed to come. The quietest of the bandit girls brought me the food and whatever other comforts Darak thought I might need. She said nothing, but her eyes darted, bright and black, like two agate wasps set in her head.

On the dawn of the fourth day, a man came with a snakebite, his arm swollen and black. He swaggered in through the tent flap, anxious to be cured without losing the arm, anxious, too, to show he set no store by me. If I did him good, that was an accident of his fortune. He was at pains to tell me what he had been at when the snake got him, which was squatting among the rocks relieving himself.

I touched the swollen flesh and looked in his face. He had no blind belief to take the healing from me, as they had in the village.

“I cannot help you,” I said.

He was sweating, and in pain, but he glared at me and lifted his good hand as if to cuff me; then thought better of it.

“You’re the healer. That’s why Darak brought you. So heal me, you bitch.”

A small door opened in my mind. I recalled something, but not much.

I drew his knife out of his belt, and he flinched nervously. I took it and dipped it in the flames of the little brazier the girl brought me at night. I got his arm again.

“Hold still,” I said, and made the quick incision before he could protest. He roared like a bull. “Now suck,” I said, “suck and spit.”

He sat with his mouth wide open, amazed at my abrupt movement and the order—crude in its basic simplicity.

“Do as I say,” I added, “before the whole of your body swells up and blackens too.”

That galvanized him into activity. Kneeling in my tent, he set to work with frantic, wide-eyed speed.

In the middle of this, Darak’s hand pulled the tent-flap wide, and he looked in. He had avoided me till now, and today had been away early, hunting; what had brought him here, I did not know. He stared in amazement for a moment at the rhythmically swaying, sucking, spitting bandit before me, then laughed.

“Some new ritual to the goddess,” he said, and went away.

The man cured himself, but it was mere luck.

The day after that, the hills were at their highest and most barren, the soil eroded, the bare rock flanks lying like great tortoises in the sun.

A group of tall trees, elegant and thin as some women can be, stood ahead of us. Foliage rested like black ribbon clouds on their tops, and at intervals in the upper branches. At sun set we began to climb toward these trees, up a flight of natural steps, the broad terraces of the hill. I knew from their urgings, jokes, and different manner all around, that we were almost in the camp now, but I could not tell where it might be. The horses’ small sure feet beat under us like little clocks. Even Darak’s horse was quieter, better and more stable, as it sensed its home. Overhead the red sky was purpling, and the stars were coming through. One fell, beyond the hills it seemed, into the plains there, with a train of golden fire. A bandit girl pointed to it, calling to us to look, but it was gone. I knew enough of their old beliefs—not only from their stories, but from the way they spoke of many things. Men who had not feared the She-One had been reared on other milk, and feared instead the earthshaking serpent, or the grave of murderers.

There were terrors in all of them, how ever well they plastered them over with experience and boasting.

The falling star had perhaps been, to the bandit girl, a god, visiting from his sky-house. To another of them it was a warrior’s death as he fell in battle.

Already I knew them a little. A sort of kinship had linked me to them beyond what linked me to Darak, even though I was not of them, and their ways disgusted me. Even he, the one I followed here, was their clay, not mine.

A crack of thunder split the sky across. Darak’s horse reared and plunged, its feet kicking loose stones downward to the lower slopes. A blazing dry wind tore by us and was gone, but away behind us the sky was suddenly scarlet and alive.

“Makkatt!” one of the men shouted. It was their name for the volcano.

We turned in our saddles on the uneasy horses, and stared back to the light in the sky.

One of the village boys, who had come with us, began to yell and weep. The nearest bandit struck him into silence.

It was very quick. The sky was red, then orange, then a filthy yellow, then bloodied and muddied back into darkness, leaving only the half-glow low on the horizon, which was the burning villages. The sound came late to us, rumbled deeply, and was gone.

I looked at Darak, and his face was hard and shut. But I knew behind his eyes, as behind mine, the thought of the village would not be still.

Their goddess abandoned them, and the wrath of the mountain came in her wake.

I remembered the altar of Evil, so far away reality had almost faded it. I remembered the voice in my skull: You are cursed, and carry a curse with you; there will be no happiness.

With a silence on us now, and the reddish lamp still alight behind us, we came up to the trees an hour later.

A rider near Darak made a sound in his throat like the barking of a hill-fox, twice, then again twice, and was answered from the trees. Three or four men untwisted themselves from the shadows, and ran up. I saw the glint of knives, but it was all formality. They must have been able to see us for hours.

A few moments in talk, gesticulations backward toward Makkatt, then we were going on, through the trees, among high jutting rocks. Three more halts and signalings with sentries—elaborate birdcalls and passwords—the gaudy toys of dangerous and well-organized men.

Then the ground seemed to open in front of us. I looked between the rock, and saw, carved through the hills, a long ravine. It was about four miles in length and perhaps a mile across, and overhung by the slopes on every side. Trees leaned over it, pines and staggering larches. Grass grew in the bowl, and pasture land where there would be brown cattle and wild little sheep. On the east side a waterfall smoked down, and there was other smoke also—and the glint of cluster upon cluster of cooking fires, outside and around the lanes of leather tents.

In the black of night, the downward track was hard and treacherous. Men cursed and horses stumbled, and little things ran away skittering, with bright eyes.

Nearer and nearer the fire blur, the smell of food and huddle and closeness. There seemed no way out now up the steep sides of the ravine.

The track widened out. We were on level ground.

Darak swung down from the horse, his men following his example. Boys came and took their mounts away to horse pens up against the escarpment, but Barak’s horse was taken somewhere else. The place jumped in the firelight, unsteady and uncertain.

I sat still on the mule, waiting.

Darak turned abruptly and came back to me.

I looked down at his face but it was all one with the moving, twisting light. I could not be sure what his look or his eyes said to me.

“They’ll put up your tent for you over there, near the waterfall. I’ll send the girl to take care of your wants—a sort of servant, but she won’t say much about it. If you need any thing, get word to me. You’re free to do as you like here.”

“Oh, yes?” I said softly.

His narrow eyes narrowed further until they were glittering slits.

“Yes.”

There was a silence between us, through the noise starting up all around. Then he said:

“I’ve work to do, things to get done. You understand.”

He turned, and began to walk away. A tall slight woman with a cloud of black hair came out of the redness ahead of him. Rings gleamed on her hands and on his as they met. He kissed her in full view of me. There seemed no logical reason why he should not.

Then she led him into a tent with blue eye-shapes painted on it.

I slid down from the mule, and the uneasy stares of the bandits flickered, heads turned, as I went by them, into the dark, while behind us all, unseen, the burning in the sky went on and on.

2

So, I might do as I liked.

This glorious freedom the king had granted me was like a weight around my soul’s neck. He had brought me here—curious about himself, not me—and now, losing interest, he handed me this strange manumission which meant nothing in physical terms, for I was their prisoner in all senses once I knew their stronghold, but meant at the same moment so much; because, by it, he had disowned me. What then had I expected?

The long sleeps came on me again, after that night of arrival. I lay still, as I had lain in the village temple, my eyes often open, in a kind of trance. I scared the girl who came with food and coals and fresh water.

She ran out yelling that I was stiff, hard and icy as a block of stone, and did not breathe. Perhaps this was true, perhaps she imagined it, but none of the women would come in my tent after that. Not that I missed them, nor they me. They were a wild bitch race, on their own among women, as I suppose all breeds of women are. They fought for their men between themselves, but did not then ride to a fight along with these men. They dressed half the time as the men did, but cooked and darned and bore their babies as if they had no other function except to be female and subservient. They had their own mysteries, and something in me shrank from their bright golden stupidity, and the sedentary glamour of their lives.

The dreams came. The shining rooms, the courts with their elaborate paving and fountains, all empty now. In a vast hall, a statue of black marble, glossy like glass. A man dressed simply, with long hair and short beard. Not here that face which haunted me, which later I had met in Darak. This was another stranger.

Where was this place, the ruin of my home? I must find it. And here I sat in the bandit’s tent.

There was in me then silent anger at myself. The piece of jade lay cool on my skin, but my life was in darkness.

So the days passed.

The camp ground was much as I had imagined, pasture dotted with cows, sheep, and goats, an orchard of fruit trees—the leftovers of some old farm, now in ruins, at the southern end of the ravine. There were vines, too, and some vegetable patches. This kind of husbandry was the women’s task. The men hunted when they were not out on other errands, and brought back steaming bloody carcasses with drooping heads.

There were a lot of people in the ravine, and it was a hotbed of their jealousies and quarrels. Some of these came to me—requests for love-potions and death-wishes, which were not granted. As for their sick, when they thought I might help them, it seemed I could do it. Otherwise, I was powerless. This made me afraid. I was the outcast in their midst. They would turn on me at last and rend me as a pack of dogs rend the lame dog when it falls. I had my enemies already—the girl whose jade I took, the man I had kicked in the genitals, and many more now, angry I had not cast their spells for them. Darak ignored, or did not see, this situation. There was a war over the hills, beyond the plains and the mountain ring and the wide river, in the southern desert regions, whose ancient great cities still stood like monoliths. It was another world to the bandits, that land, but it provided bounty. A caravan was going south, packed with war gear, bronze and iron and some gold. Darak would take this, and then barter it, piece by piece, among the plains tribes for their own smaller battles. Or perhaps he would ride south himself (he had done it before), and come into the mountain towns, claiming to be a merchant, with goods and armor to sell them.

I knew little enough of his plans. I picked up some gossip as befitted my station as a woman. At night, when he lay in the blue tent, I eavesdropped by the fires; during the day, I listened here and there as I walked the length of the ravine and back again.

There was a place, high up, near the falling shaft of the waterfall, where I used to climb and sit for hours.

Nourished by the water, which broke off in little streams and carved itself channels along the slope, the trees grew thick and dark green here. There was the sweet sharp smell of pine resin, and scents from the various flowers that pushed through the soil. They showed like white bells among the boulders, changing to reds and blues as they neared the stream. Some grew in the water itself, like filmy lavender bubbles, then hardened into purple on the far side where a little mound of stones stood leaning together. There was a slight fume of water over the spot from the falling spray. It was refreshing in the heat of the day. I used to sleep here sometimes, glad to have escaped the claustrophobia of my painted tent for a new and cleaner privacy, for no one ever seemed to come here. Lower down, where the fall had produced a round pool, the women came and filled their jars or bathed. I could see them clearly, small as dolls, and sometimes a snatch of voices blew up to me, the words always drowned by the roaring water. Below that place, I would look down again, and see the whole of the ravine, the tents, the animals and Darak’s men, wrestling and firing arrows into a target, flaying dead animals for their leather. It looked innocent and homely enough from the slope, perhaps because I was no longer part of it. I could see Darak, tiny and breakable as an insect, go into the horse field and pick out his black, or its white mate, and ride them, wheeling and jumping, standing up on their backs, somersaulting and coming down with sure feet.

Darak the gypsy and the showman, the boaster, who needed admiration like food, yet seemed to know his needs. I had seen him closer, as he rode in the horse field, his face laughing, open as a small boy’s, but, as he came out afterward amid clapping and cheers, the inward-looking amusement of his eyes. He knew.

In the middle of the night, a woman screamed and screamed outside my tent.

I got up, drew open the flap. Two girls, one with a pitch brand that seared my eyes with its raucous light.

Their faces were drawn and somehow angry. The third woman was in the arms of a big, dark-skinned man, one of Darak’s “captains” I had long ago surmised. At the moment her body was arched and straining, her hands knotted into fists.

“What is the matter?” I asked them.

The girl who did not carry the torch stepped forward, and I saw her face clearly. She did not look in my eyes but at my neck, from which, she correctly guessed, hung the jade I had pulled from hers. Shullatt.

“Illka’s in labor with Darak’s child, and things aren’t going well. We’ve come so you can cast your spells on her, and save her baby.” She looked scornful, and her mouth opened to say more, but the screams began again.

The bandit holding on to the one they called Illka said furiously: “Keep still, you damned bucking mare.”

“Bring her inside,” I said.

He ducked under the tent flap and deposited the girl, still arched and wailing, on my bed of rugs.

I looked at her and her belly was almost flat.

“In labor?” I asked, “How long has she carried?”

“Five months,” Shullatt snapped.

Illka was obviously in agony, almost unconscious, except when the pain brought its automatic responses.

“I tell her,” the other woman said, “she’s miscarrying, not bearing.”

“Where is Darak?” Tasked.

“Away.”

I was not certain why I asked. I felt obscurely that some of this pain should fall upon him, who had helped cause it. But had he been in the camp, the tent with its pattern of blue eyes would have had him, or perhaps another.

I leaned over Illka, and I could not see how to help her. Her eyes were wide now in pain and fear, but I was another shadow revolving around her agony, without a place in it. She had no faith in the witch.

“Have you no midwife?” I asked.

Shullatt sneered. “No.”

“I cannot help this girl.”

Shullatt fastened on my defeat with triumph.

“Can’t help her? Why did Darak bring you here, then, to eat our meat and drink our drink and stroll where you will in our home?”

Illka screamed.

I kneeled down beside her. Blood was running onto the floor. I did not know what to do. I put my hand on her forehead, and looked into her eyes. At first there was no response, but then, after a while, something stirred between us. I reached down into her eyes, into her mind, and closed a coolness on her brain.

“No more pain,” I whispered.

Behind me, Shullatt snapped, “What?” craning nearer.

But the girl’s face was relaxing, her body, arched for the new spasm, was leveling on the rugs. She smiled.

The other woman cried: “You’ve saved her!”

But this was not so; there was not enough belief in any of us to have saved her. I simply held her still and calm in some water of peace at the bottom of the soul, whispering to her of beautiful things. After a while, her eyes slipped gently shut. She turned stiff, and very cold.

I stood up. The man had gone out again. Birth and the complications of birth were not his province, and he wanted none of them. The two girls were still there, but it was Shullatt who moved and sparkled and was alive with venom. The other was quiet, awed by this soft, fearless death.

“You killed her,” Shullatt said.

I stood and looked at her. There was no reason to answer.

“You killed her,” she repeated. “You put a witch-sleep on her so she had no fight left! She couldn’t feel the child tearing to get out—Darak’s child. Illka you kill, and Darak’s child you kill—why, witch-woman?

What is it that makes you so jealous of the gifts he gives?”

Karrakaz moved in the gloomy tent. Evil would come to me and I would welcome it. What I had done to help the screaming girl and thought to be a blessing to her in the hopeless agony—was that only my self-deception? Would she have lived had I left her to struggle alone? I had my motives, as Shullatt instinctively guessed. Would I cut the forest of green trees down all around him, one by one, in insidious ways, until he had only the blunted faceless tree to cling to?

The black-haired girl in the tent of blue eyes, how easy it would be to be rid of her. Some drink, some balm, a perfume even. The knowledge of poisons and treachery waited in my brain.

“Take Illka away,” I said to Shullatt and the other girl. “I have done my best for her, but your goddess of bearing did not want another child as yet for the bandit camp. When Darak returns, tell him. If you have a complaint against me, I will answer it to him, not to you. He is the chief here, and you are nothing.”

The psychological ploy worked well enough. The thought of Man, the chief, herself, woman-who-was-nonentity, subdued her. She scowled. Her dark eyes blinked in the torch glare. The other one went to the door and called. Another woman came in, older, and with no expression on her face.

The three hoisted Illka’s body between them. She had no value now; they could not expect a man to carry her. They went out.

Blood had soaked into the rugs. I picked them up and flung them outside, and saw, in the faint moonlight, women scurrying together from the tents, like little black rats in the shadows. Whispers: “Illka is dead!” Shullatt would explain that the witch had killed her.

It had come, then.

3

Darak did not come back for three days. Where he was I did not know, but I guessed there might be outposts of his kingdom, lower in the hills, nearer the roadways, and perhaps he had business there.

During this time no one came near me, except once. No food, drink, or coals for warmth—but this did not bother me much. When I went to the round pool to get water, the group of women there drew off and stared at me, hostile but afraid. They would have liked to stone me and cuff me away empty-handed.

Soon they would get the courage to do it.

On the third day a man came, and said he was going to move my tent higher up, away from the others.

He looked slightly embarrassed for this whole episode was the work of the women, and it came hard to be under their influence. Nevertheless, the men liked me not at all. They were glad things had come to a head and I was to be got out of the way.

He and two others moved the tent, and set it up beyond the horse pens on a raised barren rock. From here, the rest of the dwellings looked small and bright at night, pressed together like nervous fireflies.

Soon I left the tent, and went to live in that flower-place I had found, where none of them seemed to come, and where there was water in plenty. I found berries here too, across the streams, behind the stones that leaned on one another, and gnawed mouthfuls of the bittersweet grass, and this was enough for me.

It seems it should have been easy for me to escape from them. I could have gone by night, up the steep track which was the only safe way I knew from the ravine. Surely I could have got by the sentries; I had learned enough now to know how to be silent. But Darak would come back, and my trial lay with him, and that was the answer to my self-questioning.

And I saw him come back. One smudgy dawn, stars still vivid in the sky, a group of men came riding in, not from the track, but from some passage in the ravine side, at the southern end. They passed the ruined farm, the orchards, and were about a mile away from the tents, when men and women began to come out, and run across the pasture to them.

Darak stopped. He seemed to be listening to what they said. I thought I saw him laugh. Then he rode on, and they scattered away from him. He came quite fast into the camp, and I could tell he was angry, little stiff black ant, on a black ant pony. Not angry for me, of course. Angry that such trivia should interfere with his plans.

There was more conference then. He ate, sitting outside his own big tent, and while the women brought him food and beer in great earthenware jugs, the complaints against me came and went. The hysteria was out of all proportion to the event, but it is their nature to turn on the different one. They must all be sheep.

Finally he stood up, and hit some man across the face. This must have been an insult against Darak himself. While the bandit sprawled, Darak turned, and began to walk toward my lonely pitched tent on the rock. I could almost have laughed then, seeing him go in, then come out again, and wave his arms furiously, and men go running in every direction across the ravine to search me out. But my heart began to drum, for he came toward the fall and began to climb the rocky slope as if he knew instinctively where I must be.

Watching him climb, so remote and far from me at first, but growing nearer, larger, more real and dominant, I felt as if I called him to me, and could not help myself. He paused at the pool below, looked around, then up. He did not see me. He frowned, and came on again.

I sat down by the leaning stones, and put one hand on them, for the cruel warmth of day was rising, and they were cool still, and hard and secure. I trembled, and my heartbeat stabbed in me, and I wished it were from fear.

I heard his footsteps on the stones, once through water. Twice he stopped, then moved on once more.

Then he had turned the path, and he stood in front of me, against the curdling sky of sunrise. He was dark against that light, but I could just make out his face.

He looked at me and said harshly: “Of course. Where else could you be?”

He moved along the edge of the little streams, but did not cross.

“You find comfort here, do you?” he said.

There was something in his voice and look that part of me cowered away from. I said nothing. I seemed to be drowning in his presence, but there was no help for it.

“They say”—he jerked his thumb toward the ravine—“you killed some girl because she had my child.

Brought on a miscarriage with a potion, then drugged her and let her die.”

There seemed no point in speaking, but obviously he expected an answer.

“No,” I said.

“No,” he repeated, “of course ‘No.’ Why should you do it? Shullatt speaks about you as if you were a woman, with a woman’s emotions and spitefulness, but you’re as cool as river clay. There may be wickedness in you, but not a thing as ordinary as jealousy. Besides, goddess, the gods accept only necessities. What they really want, they take without asking.”

I felt the need to grasp at this sentence, cynical, yet deeper than he meant it to be. There was no time.

“Why I brought you here I don’t fully understand. There’s a sickness with the sheep and the cattle, and this apparently is your doing too. They’ll not be happy till you’re gone.”

“Then I will go,” I said.

“Oh, no, it’s not so easy, goddess. You know our stronghold. When I say gone, I mean gone underground with an arrow through you, or your neck broken. Of course,” he added, “if I cut off your tongue and fingers—”

“No!” a shrill voice shouted. “Kill her! Your men want her dead, too, Darak.”

Beyond Darak stood a woman’s silhouette that spoke with Shullatt’s voice.

Darak half turned.

“Who asked you to follow me, Shullatt? I didn’t.”

“I knew she’d be here—the place with the Stones—and I knew you wouldn’t do what we asked—kill and burn her, and rid us of the filthy curse she brought.”

I stood up and blood tingled through me. I must die and burn, because this bitch demanded it. I crossed through the water, and she darted at me suddenly with a knife in her hand. It was her swift moment this time. The blade slit my shoulder, and blood spilled fast as wine into the stream, turning the lavender flowers purple, the red flowers scarlet. I got her throat in my hands, my knee against her side. Fool, she might have thrust me off a thousand ways, but she stabbed again, into my arm, and with the impetus of pain, I thrust her body one way, her head another, and snapped her neck.

It was too quick to think: This is Death I am giving! The impulse came from the depth of me, irresistible.

She lay in the flowers, and my blood dripped on her face.

“You never fight like a woman,” I heard Darak say. “She’d have done well to remember that.”

I felt sick, but I said: “She is taller than me, and weighs more, but fire is a great leveler. Take her body down a little way, then burn it. Show them what is left, and I will go my own way. Do not fear I will betray this place. I have nothing to gain in doing so.”

“You,” he said.

His hand came onto my shoulder. He turned me to face him, and his eyes looked in at mine through the mask-holes of the shireen.

“I can’t see you,” he said. “What are you feeling, now that you’ve killed? Nothing?”

His hand slipped downward from my shoulder onto my left breast, and the heart under it leaned and leaped as if it would burst free of me. to lie against his palm. Then his hand slid away. His face was tight and concentrated.

“Listen to me,” he said. “I’ll take her down to the pool. There’s a place near there we use for it. I’ll burn her. And show them. But you’ll stay here. If they catch you on the track they’ll pull you down like a wolf pack. Don’t worry that they’ll come for you here.” He pointed toward the leaning stones across the stream. “That place,” he said casually, “an altar of sacrifice—old as the ravine itself. I’ve heard them say some black god or other still broods here, but that’s tales for children. Good luck for you, you picked this place. Or perhaps you heard them talking.”

“Then I wait here. What then?”

“Tonight we ride south. You’ll come with us.”

“And you will let me free when we are away from here?”

He picked Shullatt up. Her disjointed head joggled over his shoulder. He grinned at me, a grin hard and white as the teeth it showed.

“No. I’ll not let you free, goddess-woman who fights like a man.”

He swung away, and down the path, and was gone.

I waited. The day was red as blood, or so it seemed to me as I lay in the flowers beside the streams, the scarlet bells brushing my eyelids. I was afraid now, aware that I had killed, and did not care much. He blunted all the edges of my guilt, but I felt guilt at lack of guilt. Karrakaz, and already evil was upon me. I thought, Run down among the tents and they will kill you, and end all this. The clouds above me formed the shape of the Knife of Easy Dying.

But I was alive as I waited for him.

I did not even smell the smoke, nor hear them come to see the burning thing, though they came. They came.

He touched my shoulder, and I started back across the sparkling darkness. I had slept, I thought, but he looked at me strangely. Had Darak, too, seen me stiff and still and unbreathing? It was cool, and twilight.

“Get up,” he said, “and put these on.”

A heap of clothes lay by me on the grass—man’s clothes, but small enough that they would fit me.

I turned my back to strip—because it was before him I would be naked.

“Where did you find these things?”

“A boy’s,” he said.

The boots were hard on my thighs, the leather belt cut my waist. He must have been a small-footed boy, with a girl’s waist too—the belt holes ran far around the band. Perhaps Darak had let women ride with him before. Still, there was no doubting this was a man’s gear—the peculiar sheaths with their cargo of spiked knives, the groin-guard under the tunic flap.

“Roll back the shirt a minute,” he said abruptly. “I brought a salve for the cuts Shullatt gave you.”

“No need,” I said.

Impatient at this presumed modesty, he came over and roughly pulled the shirt free of shoulder, upper arm, and breast. It was darkening; I could not see his face. But his breath was sucked in hard. He touched the mauve scars with nervous fingers, as if my flesh were too hot, and might burn him.

“You heal quickly,” he said.

His fingers brushed the jade.

“When you’re ready,” he said, “we’ll go down.”

“Wait,” I said. “How many men are with you? If they see me, they will know me.”

“Most of these men come from another place. The ravine men that ride with us set no store by you or your spells. It was the women’s doing, that anger, and they’ve had their sacrifice. They’ll think it’s Shullatt that’s gone with me.”

He turned, and I followed, across the icy water, through the flowers, on to a strange new turning, that wound away into the rock where there had seemed to be no opening.

Darkness, and water running on stone, then the starlight, heather tufted slopes, the stamp and whicker of ponies, and men waiting.

Darak turned me to my right. A man brought up a little black horse, which I mounted and could ride properly now without a clinging enclosing skirt. Darak was up and already riding down the hillside. I fell in with the others, feeling as anonymous as they. I pushed the hood of the cloak from my head and let the cool wind thrust back my hair. It did not matter now if they saw me.

I was adrift. The tide pulled me away. The need to think and decide seemed gone.

Through the dark movement of bodies, I saw Darak. I kept my eyes fixed on him. I was in his hands now, and whatever degradation, misery, or pleasure awaited me, must come from him. At that time, this seemed enough.

4

We rode through the night, moonless, from one black place to another. As the sky paled, the first bird and animal calls began, and invisible sentries passed us on. Low in the hills now, I could make out great sweeps of trees to the west. Beyond the last hills on the horizon there was nothing standing up but sky.

Everything beyond was flat. The Plains?

We made toward the woodland, and it was not far. By daybreak we were in the trees, and in the new camp. A small river splashed through it over gray stones. The air was moist and green, but the smells of smoke and food, animals, leather tents, and man were familiar enough.

It had interested me that Darak had brought so few men from what I took to be his camp in the ravine.

Now I began to realize that this warren, too, was his, and probably others. While he was away in different places, his “captains” kept the inhabitants in order. Odd Darak trusted to their loyalty, but perhaps he had good cause to, or had made provision against any sort of rebellion. There never seemed to be a question of leadership, or any dissent among them.

The riders around me dispersed, Darak being the first to go. He had got me out of danger, but that done, he abandoned me again. There would be new dangers now, but it did not matter much. I dismounted and left the horse to graze, glad to walk off the stiffness of riding. I felt easy and unhampered in the bandit boy’s clothes. My legs were free, despite the chafing boots; the gaudy brown and yellow silk shirt with its slightly tarnished gold thread and tassels, the waist tunic which was no more than a leather flap hind and fore leaving the legs free, all the rest of the accouterments and ornaments seemed bright and fresh after the dark red and black in which men’s various beliefs had shut me. Only the mask now, the shireen, was a closeness and a cloying, but there was no help for that.

I walked along the river bank to be away from the tents, and came to large dripping stones with a green fur of moss. I had stopped, listening to the water, when a piercing whistle sounded a few yards behind me.

“Imma!” someone called—it was an insulting pet name among the bandits, meaning “small one.”

I turned. Three or four men had followed me, soft-footed as cats. Now they grinned curiously.

Dangerous, but not unfriendly.

“Now what are you?” asked the biggest one, a black man with serpents embroidered on his tunic flaps, no doubt by some admiring female hand.

“Gleer says you’re a boy, and Maggur says you’re a girl,” put in another who had gold earrings.

“And I think you’re a bit of both,” added the third and smallest.

The fourth one—I could see now there were four—picked his teeth idly, leaning on one of the big stones, and leaving the repartee to his friends.

It seemed an uneasy situation. Possibly they would want to find out what I was by personal investigation, and they were cold-eyed for all their dark grinning faces. They too did not like strangeness in their midst.

I knew what they respected, so I said: “Whatever I am, I came here with Darak.”

Their faces altered slightly, less friendly, and less dangerous.

Then the handsome black giant swung slowly around on the pivot of his great legs, and cuffed the silent one with gentle amusement.

“No, Gleer, you’re wrong. A girl’s voice. And girl’s breasts, too. Besides, Darak’s never been a one for boys.”

The gold-earringed man moved a hand up and down before his face. “Why that?”

It was an easy answer, for I wore the shireen of the Plains tribes.

“I am a tribal woman,” I said. “I may only show my face to my lord. Or I die.”

I had heard the wearers of the shireen were told this to help them keep their modesty.

The black one—Maggur—clucked sympathetically for all of us, and sat down on a boulder. The others joined him, except for Gleer, who slunk off noiselessly. I did not understand their interest, but there seemed to be something forming between us, and I did not move away.

“Tell us, girlie. Does Darak whisper in your ear at night about his plans?”

“No.”

“Great pity.”

Their shoulders twitched, but they stayed still. It was strange, very strange. I looked hard at them, and they seemed to be waiting for something—some signal—that would come from me. I measured them, slowly: the big man; the one with gold earrings; the small one who had a lively, living look about him.

Muscles flinched in their arms and legs. Their eyes went everywhere except to me, and abruptly I knew I had drawn them here, and I held them here, though why I was not sure.

“Well,” I said.

Their eyes came back to me, three dogs waiting to obey.

I saw a bow slung over the goldearring’s shoulder.

“How far can you shoot?” I asked him.

He unslung the bow, set an arrow to it, and selected a sapling far off down the river bank. The arrow leaped, flew, and struck home. He was called Giltt, the other one Kel.

It became a contest. Kel ran off and found a wooden target, and they played at it, doing well, or indifferently, and sometimes missing altogether, and cursing. One arrow caught a breeze, went deep into fern on the other bank.

“Let her go,” Giltt said. It surpised me. Arrows were never loosed like that and left to lie.

They looked uneasy. I went across the water, stepping on the boulders in the stream, and snatched the arrow up. Between the green tattered feathers of fern I saw a little mound of stones leaning together. I turned back and stared at the three of them. They looked at me, paler, their eyes slightly fixed.

Another evil place, and I had come to it, and here I had got what I wanted without knowing, the royal bodyguard of a princess of a great house. I shivered. With both hands I snapped the arrow and threw it into the water where the current drew it slowly away.

I crossed, and walked toward the tents. They came behind me, Kel running, for he had paused to get the target from the tree.

The cook fires were alight. Meat sizzled, and a porridge I had seen before, made from nut kernels and honey. I stopped and ladled a little of the brown stuff into a bowl, and a man turned around on me from the hide he was flaying.

“Here you—keep your hands off—”

Maggur’s great fist shot out like a black python. It was only a glancing blow, but the man went over and lay groaning.

I ate the porridge, standing, Maggur, Giltt and Kel standing around me, easier now that the thing was irrevocable, ignoring it, talking among themselves.

A woman came, and bent over her man, and looked scared at Maggur.

I would be safe now, and want for nothing.

The pains began in my belly.

Kel, the small one, had, of course, called me “Imma” first. Now they all called me Imma, but it had a new ring to it. It was a concession, and they knew it. I was their mistress. They would defend me, even against Darak himself, although they would never have admitted so much. As it was they swaggered behind me, and I did my best never to push them beyond their instincts. If other men asked them what they were doing with me like bees around a honey jar, they said I was Darak’s woman, and something special besides, a healer and diviner, with holy blood—the Chief himself had told them to guard me. They had their own girls, it is true, who were jealous and curious, but Maggur took care of this, for no insult or trouble came near me from them. As for Darak, for the five days we were at the wood camp, he was busy with his captains in the great black tent, and I never saw him. A scrap of paper came with his scrawl on it, however. I was mildly surprised that he could write, but the words were uncouthly formed and misspelled in places. It said: The goddess has taken—without asking.

I felt there was an understanding between us, or rather that he understood more of me than I did myself.

I was still afraid of what I had done.

But those days were full for the first time since I had come from the guts of the mountain. For I took my guard and made them teach me something of their skill with knives and bows, and on the backs of the wild brown horses they caught in the woods and then let go after an hour or so of bruising sport. This was a good time. I could push all doubt and alarm from my mind, and think only of my moving hands and feet, and if my eye could judge far enough. The three were very pleased with me, and proud. If they were in a woman’s power—and they were, though it was too early yet for them to own it to themselves—best it should be a woman who could fight and leap and run as well as they.

I learned quickly, and I was sharp and good. The skills were there in me, in my dreams and recollections. Among the marble courts where the lizards lay now, women and men had not been separate races as they were in this world around me. Although I was far smaller and slighter even than little Kel, yet I could swing an iron long-knife as well as Maggur, and what he could break, I could bend.

And I rode the wild horses long after Maggur, with his extra weight to hold him, was flung off. I was Darak then, and a crowd would come and cheer, and Maggur would walk by my side after it, grinning, and Kel would sing.

Strange, strange, they called me Imma for their peace of mind, and for that same peace, they thought of me as a prince and a man.

And then came the night of the fifth day, and I lay in my own tent—a piece of hide Maggur had constructed for me and heard an angry grunt and a shout of abuse outside. I opened the tent flap and saw Maggur and Darak glaring at each other in the starlight. I had not realized till now that Maggur and Kel and Giltt took turns to guard my sleeping place.

“Goddess, tell this oaf to get out of my way before I gut him like a fish,” Darak snarled.

Maggur seemed to recollect himself. He stepped aside and grumbled something.

“Maggur thought you were the man who came earlier and tried to take his woman,” I said, the lie sweet on my tongue, for I had seen how much Maggur was mine, and it was a safeness, for all my doubts.

Darak swore, and strode by the bandit, by me, into my tent.

I nodded to Maggur, and went in too, letting the flap fall shut.

There was room under the hide for me, but not much for Darak. He crouched down, and when I sat facing him, he said: “The last time I did this, you used a rock on me.”

My heart, which always roused like a dog when he was near me, began to throb harder. I remembered him lying in the cindery shale, his eyes shut and his face defenseless, and how I had run from him. So slowly.

“Tomorrow,” he said, looking into my eyes, “we ride down to the River Road. That is the way the caravan goes to Ankurum.”

“Ankurum?” I said. The name seemed at once alien and familiar.

“Across the Plains, in the Low of the Mountain Ring. A great trade center, one of many where the old cities beyond the Mountains and the Water shop for their war gear. I won’t tell you all of it, but the caravan is mine. Or will be. You’ll ride with us.”

“Why? Your women were left at home I thought.” “Women. You’re a goddess, remember. I’ve heard what the black man has taught you in five days. The rest I’ll teach you.”

His eyes were glittering in the dark tent. There was hardly any light from the little brazier of smoky coals, yet I seemed to see him very clearly. Our eyes met hard and fastened together. The cool night was burning. The sound of insects in the grass sounded whirring and brittle in the fiery crystal silence.

“That’s all.” Darak said. His voice was soft and slightly slurred. He did not move.

I thought of the day he had come to the temple, the crashing screen, the day when I had taken Shullatt’s jade. I thought of night among the burned woods by the lake, of the first night at the ravine when he had gone to the tall dark girl with her cloudy hair. I thought of dawn by the streams when he had said to me:

“Besides, goddess, the gods accept only necessities. What they really want, they take without asking.”

And I had known inside me what he had said, and been unable to know it with my mind. Had all this been between us from the beginning, then, delay pointless and unnecessary? “No, Darak,” I said, “that is not all.” His teeth showed, not in a smile, and his hands caught my shoulders very hard, gathered the golden shirt in fistfuls, and ripped it open and away. He pulled me near him, and his mouth was on my breasts, but I said: “Do you have new clothes for me, Darak, if you tear all these?”

“Yes,” he muttered. He touched the mask briefly. “I’ll leave you that but nothing else.”

He pulled the boots and leggings off, the tunic, the belt, all of it. The belt buckle clashed against the brazier. His own clothes went next with more noise. I thought Maggur might come running in anger, but soon everything was silent except for the insects and the sounds of our own breathing.

He was impatient, but I made him be still a little while. I wanted to touch his body—lean-muscled as a lion’s, bronze and gold, the skin incredibly smooth over the hardness under it, except where fights had scarred it. Love of this body, which had made me so weak in everything before, had stiffened every part of me now, as it had stiffened him. My fingers brushed and cupped the burning phallus, and he pushed me back, his hands crueler and more sure than mine.

And then the breath went hissing out of him. His body grew cooler against me. I held him fast.

“No,” I said. “Do you expect your goddesses to be made as other women?”

A sort of shudder went through him, and a kind of laugh.

“You have what’s necessary for this at least,” he said.

And there was no more talk.

The insects continued their noises in the dark as if they had never stopped, though we had stopped them for a while, and all things but ourselves.

“What are you?” he said suddenly.

He lay over me, his face against my hair.

“I have no more reason to know than you, Darak.”

But when his voice went on, he had only heard me with his ears, not in his thoughts.

“Woman but not woman. Yet more woman than any other breed. And yet a different woman from women. Goddess yes, perhaps I believed it. And then, riding from Makkatt, I saw the red cloud on the mountain by night, and I came to ask you in the tent if you knew—and I saw Krill spitting the snake poison out, while you sat there so prim and stiff. And you were no goddess. And then Makkatt burst open again, and finished them. But you—” He stopped. It was so dark now, I felt him lift and lean over me but did not see. He touched my thighs, my belly, my breasts. “You’ve never done this before, and how I know it’s a mystery for there was nothing a man had to break. Virgin, and yet knowing. What are you?” His hand slid across my throat, my hair to the rolled back folds of the mask.

“No,” I said. “Darak, you took all else, but you said you would leave me that.”

His hands left me, and his body left me. He stood a little way up in the low tent, and dressed.

“Darak,” I said, but he did not answer me. He went out into the dark, and it might never have been, that first time.

5

I sensed Karrakaz near me in my sleep, and strove to wake, and could not. Through the oval door I looked at the flickering color in the stone basin of the altar, and it drew me, sucked me in—only the green coolness could save me and I did not know where it was. My hands went to the bandit jade around my neck, but in this place it was black and dull and useless as iron.

A great hand took my shoulder, and shook me out of the nightmare.

“Maggur,” I whispered.

“Nearly dawn,” he said. “Darak’s men will be riding soon, to the River Road.”

He didn’t seem perturbed by my nakedness. He held out a piece of shimmery stuff—green and purple and red.

“I came earlier,” he said, “after he went away.” He grinned at the torn shirt. “I got a new one—off a woman, an Imma like you.”

Darak had not come for me. Had he expected me to recall on my own, or had he wanted to leave me behind at last? I dressed, and Maggur dismantled the tent. Outside, a little way off, Giltt and Kel were waiting with ponies and my little black horse, all saddlebags packed and ready. They had arranged I should go to Darak with my own state it seemed.

I rode ahead, Maggur a pace behind me, the other two paired behind him.

I heard other harness jinking soon. A clearing, faintly greening in the first hint of day, spangled with dew.

A few heads turned around to look at us.

“Darak’s woman and her men,” they said.

Maggur grinned.

Darak looked up from what he was doing, and nodded to me. That was all. A man came and handed me a long-knife, which I stuck through my belt. The other horses were being stripped of their bells and jingling medallions. Kel saw to ours, and Maggur put them away in one of the saddle pouches.

I could smell the dawn.

Darak was on his pony. He held up one arm, and the silence deepened.

“Now listen. We’ll reach the ford at noon. The caravan will go by anything from an hour to three hours later, depending on the time they’re making. The signal to take them is a wolfs howl. Don’t move before it; when it comes, move fast. Remember the others across the water. Head runaways back toward them.

Kill every man, starting with their guard, but not a scratch on the horses.”

He turned the pony and began to ride off into the woods.

We followed.

There seemed nothing wrong in it then, that we should be riding to kill men, knowingly. They were hardened and unthinking, and I was so contemptuous of human life. And there was hurt and anger in me, too.

The sun came up, blotching the leaves acid green. We rode downward all the time, the trees thinning in places, leaving lower slopes visible that faded away into the flatter ground. The river seemed to move with us, sometimes on show, flaring with sunlight; always in our ears.

We reached the ford, crossing a little before noon.

The river bent like a bow in front of us, narrowing at a point to the left. Through the screens of foliage and thick fern, I made out the broad track—the route the caravans took, which led toward the great South Road. The track halted on the far bank, continued on the near bank. In between, stakes stood up in the shallow water, indicating, with blackened notches, how high the river would run in flood. It was about twenty feet across.

I had gathered from snatches of talk around the wood camp that this was to be a new place of attack.

The merchants were accustomed to trouble farther out, where the track met the South Road. They would be fairly easy as yet, and surprise was a great thing. But they had a strong and vicious guard—Maggur had told me as much.

“Those ones,” Maggur said, “they train them in the northern towns from childhood. A man can boast forty scars on his body at fifteen years. Teach them to steal from street markets and beat ’em when they’re caught. They bring them up on cruelty like a mean dog, and like mean dogs they grow. They bite, so watch their teeth, the ones in their belts, that is. And any blow, make sure you kill with it. Pain only makes ’em mad, they’re so used to it—inspires them, you could say.”

We settled down to wait. Bread and salt meat and beer in leather bottles went around, but Barak’s men hardly made a sound. Even going off to urinate, they moved as stealthily as snakes. I began to see why most of them had been picked from the wood camp, where the bandits learned tree-craft as a matter of course, stalking deer or other prey.

It grew very hot. Sunlight boiled its green bubbles in the branches, and a bluish mist rose from the fallen leaves underfoot. The river was a cataract of polished opals.

Suddenly a woodhawk screeched. I glanced at Maggur. He nodded. It was a signal, and they were coming, the fat stupid merchant men, and their terrible outriding guard.

A rustle, crushing of ferns, tramp of horses hooves, big horses these, roll of wagon wheels through undergrowth.

The first two riders appeared. Guard. I felt Maggur tense a little, but he made no sound. They were black, too, but it was black cloth and hardened leather, not skin. Every inch of them was covered and armored, even their hands in black gauntlets, even their faces—like mine—masked. But these masks were different, for they were made in the likeness of black bone skulls, from which grew black, coarse plaited manes of horsehair. Their horses were enormous and black also. Cold ran down my spine, and my hand clenched on my long-knife. There was something about them—something. I felt the need to shiver, and spit the taste of their nearness out of my mouth.

They rode into the mid of the river, looked about them; then one shouted something in a high clear voice.

At once others appeared, and then the swaying canopied wagons drawn by ponies. The procession began to cross the river.

A wolf howled nearby, hoarse and urgent.

I had a glimpse of the black skull faces turning in surprise, and then we had moved.

There was one sound and one movement only, or so it seemed in the first seconds. The merchants’ cries of panic, neighing splashing horses, the shouts of Darak’s men bursting free from tension at last, the rushing forward with no chance to draw aside and have no part in it, were all one imperative thing.

The iron long-knife was in my right hand. There was no time to think. “Make sure you kill,” Maggur had said. The knife swung in an arc. The great black body toppled slowly over and away from me, not entirely black now, but red as well.

The horse under me was level and good. It danced forward and a black guard leaned down at me, and his own knife very long and hooked at the end—slashed out. I caught the hook on my own weapon, and pulled at him. It seemed easy. He too fell slowly, and the spiked knife in my other hand dug into him, twisted, and came free. Blood and other stuff splattered up to my elbow. I saw it, but it did not seem to be my arm on which it spilled.

There was a little lull around me then. On every side there was the mess and uncertainty of fighting. The horses were staggering in the stream, and merchants and boys were running into each other in the water, shrieking. It was almost comic, but there was too much terror for that. One man was wriggling and straining on the driver’s box, trying to get his team around. I recalled that the merchants must be killed too. I rode at him, and the knife went in and out and he rolled sideways into the frothy pink water, his eyes full of reproach.

Maggur charged past, grinning, a black-maned mask in one hand, dripping knife in the other.

Across the river the others of Darak’s ambush were milling in to close the gap.

I felt sick abruptly. Evil was on me and I knew it. A kind of scream came whirling up from my belly and out of my mouth. I clamped the horse between my thighs, and kicked the spurs into it. I lifted the long-knife in a double grasp, over my head, letting the other one go. I plunged back into the chaos, and my arms swung left and right, and the knife spun at the end of them like a wheel of silver pain. I do not know how many I killed, but I killed many. There was a ringing in my head, and an anger in me, and a blood-red roaring triumph. I did not see much of what I did until I was in the river, and flung backward from my little horse, which in its turn lolled forward and went under. The cold, the taste of blood and river bitterness brought me out of the death dream. I staggered to my feet, stumbling on stones and bodies under the froth. At that moment three of the skull guard came leaping in at me. The horses’

bodies, on the great black stretch of that leap, seemed to stop still in the air. Their hooves were buzzing iron hammers falling on me. I struggled, and thought I was going down in quicksand; I could not seem to get my balance. They came like huge black birds, the water breaking like glass. One hoof struck me, a glancing blow—more like a quick hot hand, brushing back the hair from my neck. I fell again, and the hook-knives came flaring over me.

A man roared, and Maggur flung himself at them seemingly from out of nowhere. I glimpsed Giltt. Little Kel was there too, or his arrow. A guard jumped forward from his saddle, and fell near me, the flight just showing between his shoulder blades. But Maggur was spinning down also, out of sight, and the two remaining blacknesses had reached and caught my arms.

I was lifted up by them, carried backward between them very fast, across the river. I was aware that they would half stun me on the nearest tree, then finish me as slowly as they had time for. It pleased them to do this to me, perhaps because I had killed some friend of theirs—if such men had friends or lovers.

But then a shock went through them. I looked up and saw Darak behind us. Both his knives had gone, flung one into the back of each of my captors. They toppled and their grip was still tight on me. I thought I should be torn in two, but the grasp lessened at the last second, and I fell backward into the water with them.

Darak leaned over me and lifted me up.

“Both your knives are gone,” I said. It had seemed foolish of him to let go both of them to save me.

“The fight’s over,” he said.

I stared around me, and it was true.

“Maggur,” I said. “He came at them, and fell—”

Barak’s hand came swift and fast across my face. I stumbled and he caught my belt to steady me.

“I came at them, too, bitch. Thank me for it.”

“I thank you,” I said.

I picked my way among the debris in the river, past him, back to the bank.

They cleared the bodies from the water and burned them, then organized the stuff in the wagons. I did not see any of this. Kel and I sat together in the shade, under a leather awning, where Maggur lay. Of the bandits only four were dead, but one of them was Giltt. My attackers had managed it as he ran at them, and I had not even seen them do it. Other wounds were few and not serious. Only Maggur had been badly hurt.

“There was a fourth one, Imma—he swung at Maggur from the back with an iron club they carry. I got him too, after.”

I had wiped the blood away and cleaned the deep cut, and the skull seemed whole under my fingers, but Maggur did not wake up, and I could sense a sort of death on him.

We sat a long while, Kel and I. Then he said: “Imma, can’t you ...?”

“What?”

“They said you’re a healer.”

A little bright shock went through my brain.

“You think I can save Maggur?” I asked softly.

“Of course.”

There was no doubt in his face.

There was mist in the morning, and Darak came.

He glanced at Kel asleep, and Maggur sleeping too, healthily and deeply.

“Today we are merchants,” he said. “We go on to the South Road, protected by our skull-guard, of course. The bandits are rife hereabouts they tell me.”

His voice was light, his face cold.

Suddenly he said to me: “Is that brute your lover?”

“Kel?”

“No. The other one.”

“No,” I said. “Except he loves me a little.”

Darak’s mouth was set and sneering. “Of course, goddess.”

He bowed to me.

There was no one near to see. Kel and Maggur slept. I struck Darak across his set sneering mouth.

“Take back your blow,” I said. “I never deserved it of you.”

He looked as if he would kill me, but he did not kill me. I had not hurt him, and no one had been near to see. Otherwise it would have been different.

1

The woods were gone, and the river which fed them was gone. The hills moved behind us in a slow procession, and before us lay the open plains. Yellow-brown as old parchment rolled the curve of their backs, farther off they melted into lavender and purple. The odd tree, leaning, its branches spreading low and still, the occasional rocky place, or little stretch of grassland sprung up by some muddy pool, stood out like isolated figures on a gameboard. It was to be like a game—hurrying from one watered square to another, across the parched listless land.

It was a merchant caravan again, now under Darak’s leadership, and he was a merchant’s son from Sigko, one of the northern towns, where these goods had come from. I had turned over the stuff myself—weapons and armor pieces, or raw metals in great bars. The bandits had picked a few items each, in payment for the battle in the ford. I took a long knife, larger than I was used to but with a weight I knew I could carry, given practice. It was fine workmanship, the great blade seared and inset with a silver leopard. The hilt was made from some white stone, highly polished but roughened a little around the grip so it would sit tight in the hand. The sheath and sling, which went across the breast and back to hang under the left arm, were crimson velvet over leather, the buckle and notches were gold.

When I chose this knife, no one stopped me, or laughed, even though Maggur was still in his shelter.

Despite the ignominious ending of my fight, I had done some skillful damage, The talk was mainly of how I had yelled my battle cry and ridden straight in among the guard, the long-knife wheeling in all directions at once. This was not as they thought, and I would not discuss it. They were probably glad the mad woman was not a boaster too.

But I think none of them considered me a woman any longer. A few women still journeyed with them, as a comfort, but dressed more somberly now, as prostitutes, and the men spoke of them in front of me, quite freely—not as a taunt, or to brag, but as if they had forgotten my sex, and expected me to tell the next tale.

All their clothes were altered. Darak wore black, the rest of them somber blues and clerical greens, stripped from the bodies, or provided beforehand. The men who rode as the guard had put on their covering, but kept the skull masks off their faces as long as they could. Only I remained unchanged, colorful, an oddity.

We were on the plains two days when I went to Darak’s tent. His captains would be there, I knew, but things were different now. No one would flinch when I came because I was female.

There was talk and laughter inside, and the clink of the bronze beer jug going around.

I lifted the flap and went in.

It was a big tent, the inside leather painted too, with red running deer, and high up a sunburst, which meant power. There were fine rugs on the floor, low chairs, and I recognized the carved table I had seen in the village. The five men glanced up, interested. Darak looked me hard in the face, then continued with what he had been saying. Ignoring that I had been ignored, I walked to a vacant chair—more stool than chair, but there was no help for that—and sat down.

They had taken their cue from Darak. They ignored me, and the talk went on—elaborate plans, which were really very simple in essence, of how they should get the stuff along the South Road, sell it in part before Ankurum, their goal, and what was to be done in Ankurum itself. It was a dangerous adventure.

Their eyes were alight. The jug came around and I took it as it was bypassing me, and, easing it up under the folds of the shireen, drew a mouthful from one of the open tubes set in the sides. I did not want this drink, but that jug—one of their symbols—could not be let by so easily. I swallowed the viscous, bitter swill, wanting only to spit it out, then handed the jug on to the man it had been going to. There was a little silence. Then Darak stood up. He looked strange, nobler in the black full tunic, black leggings and boots.

“Drink, and get out,” he said pleasantly to his captains.

The discussion was over. They had covered all points, but I guessed a meeting such as this would have gone on much longer normally. They would have perfected details, unnecessarily perhaps, told jokes and stories of other ventures, and drunk very deep.

Now the men got up. They went past me uneasily, once outside, laughed and blundered around in some horseplay or other.

“What does the goddess want?”

He was abrupt, uneasy as they.

“To hear your plans. I am tired of knowing only a moment or so before we move.”

“It was a meeting beteen the chief and his people. Not for goddesses,”

I thought, I can go now be free of him. I must go, must be free. Already there is blood on me, and willbe more unless I go. And he does not want me.

But I said lightly: “The gods must be everywhere, Darak. Next time you will not send them away when I come in.”

He went to the tent flap, threw the lees of the beer across the grass. Coming in, he tied the flap shut, and began to strip ready to sleep. When he did this, it was somehow insulting. Every muscle flick, brazier gleam on his naked torso was a jeer at me. He began to pull off the high boots, slowly, with great care.

“I suppose you’ll stay,” he said.

They have such pride in their sex, these men and women, that there must always be dignity and battle in it. He expected me to untie the tent flap and march out, my back stiff with fury, but it was no matter to me.

“I will stay,” I said.

He stood up and moved quickly over to me. He seized my arm, and his fingers and thumb were like five iron talons in my flesh,

“Did you make the mountain burn?”

It astonished me, this superstition again, festering in him.

“No,” I said.

But I was not sure. The curse had gone out with me from the volcano, so Karrakaz had promised me.

“The villages, all of them. That second time there would be nothing left,” he said.

I touched his face with my free hand.

Quite calmly now, and with precision, he began to undress me. When everything lay on the floor, he went to the brazier and pulled down its lid. The light turned smoky and purple.

“Take off the mask,” he said to me.

I felt utter panic then. Before I could move, he came at me, got my hands, and the mask, and wrenched it free. Air, cool and burning on my face. I screamed, again and again, struggling to get my hands free to cover myself, my eyes tight shut. His own hand came hard over my mouth and nostrils to stifle the screaming. I could not seem to breathe, and was losing consciousness, still struggling like a fish in its awful agony on a hook. All my being seemed to be struggle and terror, and behind my lids I saw that mirror under the volcano, and the devil-demon-beast that looked back at me from its burned-white eyes.

It was good for him, I suppose. He was conquering me in my fear, and his own fears, too. I felt him, but it was some thing done to me, disgusting in its remoteness.

I swam back to the tent from the darkness. I do not know how long it had lasted, but not long, I think.

He lay by me, but he had put the shireen in my hand. I understood him, and what he had done, but it made no difference to me then. I held the shireen tight, but did not put it on. Tears ran down into my hair, but it seemed not to be I who wept them.

“No man and woman can lie together as we did,” he said. “This”—he touched the shireen—“has a face of its own, staring at me. Go masked with others, not with me. I saw you before. You can’t be secret from me; every beauty and ugliness and strangeness and difference of yours is mine by right if I have a right to your body.” His hand slid between my thighs, but not to my sex. “You weren’t afraid to let me find this in the dark—or rather to find the absence of it. A woman, but not human. Listen,” he said, but no more after that. He leaned and kissed my mouth, which he had never done before. I opened my eyes.

His face, so near mine, was gentle, almost tender. There was no repulsion in it.

Life leaped in me, for there was no repulsion in it.

I saw that he had set me free of something, with him at least, but chained me too, of course. It was a happiness for me, but a conquest for him—of both of us. But nothing mattered. I let the shireen drop away, and put my arms around him instead.

2

Darak rode a little ahead of the caravan, and I, astride one of the smaller merchant horses, rode at his side from then on. Maggur and Kel came behind me, a handful of Darak’s men behind him. At evening, when we halted, he would try my fighter’s skill and my skill with the bow. But I was excellent with both; Maggur and the others had been good teachers.

“You have eyes like a hawk,” Darak told me. With the bow I was better than he, but it did not seem to trouble him, surprisingly. He knew his hold on me, I imagine. At night we were lovers in the tent, and later, when the River Road, days away from the river, found the South Road, and the nightmares began, he was very good to me.

It was strange, the way we came to it. We had followed the track so long I was used to its roughness, and the undergrowth which strangled it in the woods, the drifts of loose soil blown across it on the plains.

It was a dull hot day, the sky full of black hammerheads bringing the first of the autumn storms. We rode through a little scrubby tangle of bushes, over a small rise among rocks, and the track faded away like a snail’s trail in front of us.

Beyond the rocks, the ground stretched open and flat, and on the horizon stood up two giant pillars, the same brownish color as the plains. Once they had been even taller, now the tops were split and crumbled away, but still towered over thirty feet above our heads. There was carving on them, some deep, some surface, most of which was weathered smooth. I had ridden ahead to them, and Darak had followed me, waving the others back, I suppose, for they did not come up for some time. My face, in its daytime mask, could have told him nothing, but perhaps he knew me enough now that he could sense my thoughts.

I got down and put my hands on the stone. Ancient, ancient, far-back greatness seemed to throb through the pillar I touched. I was cold and burning as I traced the figures of birds and lions, dragons and serpents. A hollow giddiness went through me. I shut my eyes, and under the lids the pillars stood whole, ten feet higher, with capitals of phoenixes and flames.

“What?” Darak asked me.

I had spoken, and did not know what I had said. I could not seem to take my hands from the tall stone.

Between the two uprights a paved road stretched away, straight as an arrow shaft, and fifty feet across.

The pillars were wide apart, but so huge they must be close together on their own scale, a different scale from anything else around them.

Suddenly the horse Darak was riding flung up on its hind legs, teeth like yellow marble glinting in the storm-light. It ran around on itself and tried to bolt. Darak got it in hand a few yards away, but the merchant horse which was mine was running too, straight off toward the rocks. I heard Darak swearing as he spurred after it.

The sky was indigo, choked and bruised with hate; the air seemed filled with the wings of beating blue eagles. Then the cloud split. There was a blind light, a cold heat—boiling and terrible. I felt myself thrown backward, turning in the air, blazing.

Rain fell on my face in icy needles, and far-off thunder curled and rolled. I felt someone’s hands touching every part of me, very carefully. My eyes cleared and I saw Darak.

“Are you hurt?” he said. “I can’t find anything broken or burned.”

Maggur spilled water on my wrists, but I sat up and pushed the bottle away.

Lightning had struck the pillars, but they had received no more damage than I.

I felt light-headed and dizzy, but that was all. I laughed a little. Darak got me around the waist and lifted me onto my horse, quiet now, and trembling. As I smoothed its ears and neck to comfort it, I was still laughing.

We rode back toward the pillars through the rain. As I passed between them I saw the inscription, carved deep into the paving. None of them would know it, for it was not their tongue.

KAR LFORN EZ LFORN KL JAVHOVOR

This way is the High-Lord’s Way

I blinked the rain from my eyes and saw that the inscription was so weathered now, I could not read it at all.

The rain lasted two days, but seemed to do the land no good. It was sucked in and lost, or turned to mud which dried blackly. The road was untouched. Magnificent, it had kept itself countless centuries for the merchants who now used it. For me, it was peopled with ghosts, and the voices and the wills of ghosts.

That was the time of the dreams.

There had been a time before then, when my life had been half dream, when I had lain in the temple or by the water in the ravine. Now my life was awake, and my dreams were little things as I lay by Darak.

Yet the road made it otherwise.

All those first two days of rain, riding with the road, there had been a feeling on me, like oppression before storm, though the storm was here. The third day we made our evening camp at the road’s side by a shallow pool, with a little stream plunging into it, among the stunted stretching trees.

There are no particular laws in the dream places. I was a man, and that did not seem strange to me. I say a man, but not a man like any men I had met since I came from the mountain. I was a man of my own race, that special and arrogant people I did not remember, yet knew in myself.

Things were very different in the dream.

Great gardens, falling in terraces, dark green cypress, rose trees and lemon, behind, the huge mansion, built with an architecture I had seen before in sleep, very white and tall and soaring, its crown far up in the sky. Beyond the garden wall, the High-Lord’s Way, winding on toward the cities of the Mountain Ring.

Walking down between the scented avenues of trees, and ahead the great oval pool set around with marble statues and steps. Fountains tumbled into the pool, and near them, among the marble blocks angularly carved to represent rocks, a girl was splashing water over her body. She was naked, magnolia-colored against the jade-green water, and her hair streamed around her. The man I was walked to the water’s edge and spoke to her. And it was the tongue in which the inscription on the road had been written.

“Di lath samor?”

I desired her, and she was afraid, and her fear was part of my desire. Now, she cowered away from me in the greenness. She was so much smaller than I, and human; lower, less, nothing. But very beautiful. I was aware her foot was chained under the water, and she could not get out. Her bathing actions also had been at my orders.

“Slen ez Kalled-a. Kar aslor tin ez.”

She put her hand up to her face, and began to whimper. I stepped onto the water, which held me lightly.

I walked across to her and then allowed myself to sink a little. She began to scream as I caressed her, pushing her sliding cool body back against the slippery silken marble where the water fell. The fountains filled her mouth. She struggled. I held her by her dripping hair, in and out of the fall. The dance of love and death had begun, and both would be fulfilled.

Darak shook me awake and held me quiet in the dark. “What were you dreaming?”

I stared into his face, in the gloom of the tent which I knew. But I could still smell the splashing water, the scents of the garden and the girl’s wet body; the man’s desire still spread between my thighs. But there was horror, too, waking and knowing.

“A man,” I said, “here, in this place. Drink no water from the pool; one woman at least is rotten mud on the water’s floor.”

Darak shook me again, more gently.

“Wake up,” he said.

“True,” I said, “she was inferior, the lower race. It gave him pleasure, he who could walk on the pool’s surface, to drown her, and take her as her lungs filled with water.”

“You were talking in your sleep—another language.”

“Not I,” I said. “He spoke. He told her what he would do to her.”

Darak’s face, almost invisible in the dark, seemed troubled. He smoothed my hair, and stroked my body, trembling like the body of an animal in fear. But he did not know whether to believe me, or to assure me it was a nightmare and nothing more. I must not tell him another time—for I knew there would be other times—he was stronger and safer to me when he had no doubts that I was human and foolish, a woman who dreamed, and, waking in fright, turned to her man to comfort her. I curled against him to sleep, and there were no more dreams that night.

But more nights followed. For every sleep on that road there was one dream at least. I told Darak no more of them, and when he woke me, as he often had to, from something horrible, I would say I could not remember.

But I learned a lot from those bitter teachings.

How many thousands of years had passed since the ones who bred me had lived their lives in the world?

And how far had they stretched their evil and corruption, and their careless cruelty to those who could not match them? In this land, yes, I knew they had been kings, and High-Lords, and empresses. But beyond the sea, too? And beyond other seas? Oh, they were dust now. Except for me. Often, often, I woke from those dreams of what they had done and been, and saw in the dark the knife Karrakaz had shown me, and it must be right to let evil out of the world. It seemed to me that I was not like them, and yet I knew I was. Only my environment and my lack of Power prevented me, and even so I had done well. I had killed without thought, and even Giltt, whom I had made mine, I had not considered for an instant, though he was dead because of me.

And they were beautiful, were they not, the men and women of my race? Golden and alabaster, their long hands alight with jewels, their eyes like green stars, masters of every element and magic the world held. Through flames and over waters they walked; they flew with the black wings of great birds, wheeling across the red skies with the moon a white bow beneath them; they vanished, and moved like ghosts. I remember she I once was, riding the back of a huge lion in some desert place, smiling and lovely as the orchids embroidered on her skirt. But she was evil, too.

After seven days of this, I was feverish and strange. We rode all day long, but at every stop I was impatient to move on. At night I would walk up and down the camp, putting off the moment of sleep. But sleep always came, and would not be resisted. I began to bleed, too, Which is natural enough with all creatures that carry a womb, yet it had not happened before with me, and it was painful and distressing.

Besides, I feared this fertile womanhood. I knew none of the methods of contraception my race had clearly understood. As for the bandit women, what they did was quite absurd, and achieved nothing, except, I suppose, to keep some witch or other from starving. I did not want to conceive. Any child would have been a misfortune then, and Darak’s seed—a bandit brat, tying me perhaps forever to a life that was not mine—was unthinkable. I did not know what to do. I simply willed myself into barrenness, wildly and hotly, whenever I thought of it.

It was on the ninth day that we came to the city.

“Is this Ankurum?” I asked Barak.

My eyes were swimming with the fever and the heat haze, and I seemed to see on the horizon white walls and towers, and vistas of many buildings behind them.

“No,” he said, “we’re days from Ankurum yet.”

Maggur said: “That’s a ruin, Imma. Only a ruin.”

“Some of the Plains tribes call it Kee-ool,” Darak said. “That means Evil One. They keep away from it, and from the road, or we’d have had company long ago. A place to suit you, goddess.”

There was always a little poison ready in him when he was unsure of me, but I hardly heard what they said.

“We pass through it?” I asked.

“Yes. The road goes through.”

“Then stop there, Darak.”

He grinned without any good humor. “We have the time,” he said.

It was late afternoon when we reached it. Perhaps we would have stopped here anyway, although some of the men muttered and grumbled. They took out their amulets, and kissed and shook mem, but they did not come to Darak asking to go on. Their leader did not fear Kee-ool, they thought, and would laugh at them. Though Darak was edgy, and did not like this place. Truly, there seemed to be something miasmic about it, apparent even to an unimaginative man.

On either side of the paved way, it stretched for miles toward the dim mauve shapes of what must be hills or low mountains. The buildings, or what remained of them, were very white, bleached like bones by the sun. They were like bones in other things, too, the way they stood, gaping, the rib cases and skulls of palaces, joints of pillars, leaning, fallen. There was no color except for the odd vine or weed with flowers that had struggled through to crawl in and out. The land in its eternal brownness, the sky soaking into carnal scarlet, were only a backdrop, something additional, as if the city had stood in space a long while before earth and air formed around it.

I was not sure why I needed to go into it. It was not here that I remembered from my brief childhood how many centuries ago.

I sat in my hard-won place in Darak’s tent, while he and his captains drank around their calendar. It was a primitive colorful thing of carved and painted wood. On it, every season, month, and day had a symbol.

Late summer was a golden frog, and now they were ringing the day which was an owl, for this was the time they had arranged with the Plains tribes for their first selling of weapons.

“Madness to let go fine stuff like this on those savages. They’ll pick their teeth and cut up apples with it.”

The man spat. Arrogance here too, then, in the hierarchy of human standing. But I was hardly listening.

They passed me the beer jug from time to time, and I occasionally drank to symbolize my involvement. I said nothing.

When the tent emptied, Darak stretched out on the rug bed, and looked at me.

“Well? When are you leaving to wander in Kee-ool?”

“When the moon is up,” I said.

“Wake me,” he said. “I’ll sleep off this beer now, and come with you.”

“I must go alone.”

“Don’t be a fool. Wild animals run loose in that place; men too, perhaps as nasty-minded as my own. I know you can fight, and you’re no sniveling idiot of a woman, but remember the ford.”

“I remember it,” I said. “Sleep then. I will wake you.”

He was already drowsy with the drink, he had taken such a lot of it, as he always did. Otherwise he would never have believed me. I went to sit by him, and watched him slip into sleep. He was a beautiful man to look at, even sleeping. He slept like an animal, lightly but serenely, his mouth firmly closed, his body twitching sometimes, and his hands and feet, like the paws of an animal, dreaming. I kissed his face, and left the tent. It was twilight, starlit and quiet, except where men were drinking and making a lot of noise at the fires. They were louder than usual as if to defeat the heavy silence of the place. Only the wind made sounds, thin and rasping, as it piped through holes and empty rooms.

3

I left them behind me very soon. The firelight melted away, and the raucous singing that had started up.

Only the wind now, thilling through stone, sushing through the dust. Darkening landscape, the whiteness a darker whiteness, picked out in starlight. I had an hour, perhaps, before the moon rose.

It was easy to walk down the endless straight streets. Only here and there was the drum of a fallen pillar which must be climbed over. A few little scatterings of small animal fright away from me, but there did not seem to be many living things in this dead city, after all. All around were the shells of palaces. It was a city of palaces, and their gardens and pools and groves and statues and places of pleasure. There could be no lesser building in such a hive of opulent contempt. I walked up cracked marble steps to a high platform where two or three pillars still stood, but nothing else. I looked back and saw the little gleam of the firelit camp, faint and far off—farther than it was, it seemed, as though a semi-transparent curtain shut the city away from it.

Ahead, beneath the platform, great terraces fell down to an oval space—some huge open theater. I walked down toward it, across narrower streets, then in at the vast arched doorway, carved with shapes of women and animals. Steps led upward to the terraces, other steps led downward. The wind brought me a faint odor from the descent that could not still be there—musky darkness, and fear. I went up instead, to the top tier. Marble seats, aisled, each with their columns and carvings. The staircases which ran down between them toward the oval floor were laid with colored stones, red and brown and green and gold. I stopped. Dimly, softly, I heard their voices around me. I turned, and they had come, but only as ghosts. Many men and women and their children, friends, and lovers. Their clothes were a ghostly pastel of scarlets and purples and white. Canopies dripped gold tassels, house banners floated. I looked toward the oval space—and the colors hardened around me, brighter and closer, and the sounds rose above the wind. Below, a green fire was opening like a flower. It shifted and spread itself around the arena, and took shape. A forest of flame, glittering and shimmering. Trees rose from it, with trunks of emerald, branches opening into fiery stars. Fountains burst out of the ground, and a white mist rippled like gauze, threading through everything. It was beautiful and incredible. A little applause stirred among the audience. It seemed I was one of them, aware of cool silk on my body, diamonds, a man’s fingers caressing on my breast until I brushed them off, not wanting my attention diverted.

A girl rose out of the mist and flame. She was white-skinned with long black hair, but unreal, a two-dimensional creature, drawn around with a dark line. She moved her arms and head, dancing, and a snake came winding toward her, a cameo of cream and gold with a silver darting tongue. The snake, too, was unreal, and so was the golden-yellow man who followed it. The fire trees turned gradually to red, the mist to purple like a great storm cloud, the fountains ran like blood, and seemed to swell. The figures in the arena were growing in size, and changing as they entwined with each other. The snake coiled and twisted with a woman’s head; the man moved languidly, the head of the snake replacing his own; the woman slithered between them, headless, the man’s face growing under her breasts.

As the figures grew larger, the alterations became more complicated and bizarre. The purple cloud mist was pulsing from the oval space, filling the terraces with a heavy opiate smell, while the tableau rose up toward us, the things in it ten feet high or more. Delighted cries came from parts of the theater. The woman, serpent headed, bent backward, the man, his phallus replaced by the enormous thrashing tail of the serpent, leaned over her, inches from my face. My lover’s hand was on me again, and I did not now push him away, but leaned nearer. ...

A loose stone went from under my feet, rattled, struck, and plunged into the arena. The theater was chill, and broken, and empty. The wind tore my hair, and I was dankly cold. The moon was lifting. The light seared my eyes clean of what I had been staring at.

But I was not alone. I sensed it, and looked across the theater. I was lucid then, not particularly feverish or dreaming. A street or so away stood a tall tower. What was left of it was little enough—one open side and the staircase winding round and round like a twisted spine. After I had seen these, I suppose the lucidity ran away out of me. Something drew me to the tower, strong and insistent.

I will fly there, I thought. I felt a swift splitting pain in my back. I say pain, but in a strange way it was pleasant. I have heard men, whose arms or legs were lost in some fight, swear that they still felt them there, tingling and twitching to be used. This is what the wings felt like as they grew from my shoulders, and put down their roots into the muscle and bone of my back, like limbs I had lost but were still there, tingling and twitching. I moved them, and this was strange. An extra pair of arms would have been more familiar. Even in my fever-dream, I was amused by my first efforts at flight. No baby bird was ever so clumsy. But it came to me in the end, and I lifted. Then I felt the power of them. Each strong beat seemed to come more from the pit of my belly than from my spine. I held my legs firm together, and arms crossed under my breasts, as I had seen them do in my other dreams. It was only a short way to the tower.

A stone altar stood there, and I knew it well enough. In the white bowl there was a flickering and a shadow. But I was not afraid.

“So Karrakaz Enorr,” whispered the no-voice in my brain, and I knew which tongue it used, now that I had heard the dream ghosts speak it. “I am Karrakaz. The Soulless One. You do not think you know why you are here, but you are here because Karrakaz is here, and we are one thing, you and I. I have grown since the volcano. You have fed me well. I will destroy you, but first we shall be one thing. Let me give you Power to rule these Shlevakin. They are only little things and much beneath you. But how dangerous the little poison ants who will eat you alive. You will not find the Jade, so I will give you a little Power, Princess of the Lost, before your Darak turns from your cursed face, and the jackals tear you.”

It seemed good to me. The word Karrakaz had used—“Shlevakin,” the filthy dregs, the mud and excrement of an inferior people—so right to call them that, they were so far beneath me, what I was and what I might have been. But before I could stretch out my hand and say, “Give it to me,” some elemental thing took hold of me, and shook me. I clung to the stone of the tower before I could be shaken down, and screamed furiously, “Let me alone!”

“Kill it,” the no-voice said.

My hands found a huge loose tile, and I grasped it and thrust it out toward what seemed to be tormenting me.

There was a crash, loud as thunder, in my right ear. The tower disintegrated and I fell.

I seemed to fall, but not far. I opened my eyes, and was lying on the red and green stones of the theater steps. A hand got my arm, and pulled me up again almost immediately. It could be no other hand but Barak’s.

His face was pale and angry in the moonlight.

“You woke and followed me,” I said.

“And found you standing here like a block of stone with your eyes wide open. I shook you and you didn’t wake up. If you have these fits, you’re a fool to walk up so high.”

It was Darak, then, who had kept me from the evil in the tower. Yet I could not have been in the tower after all. The wings were gone for sure.

“You’re coming back now,” Darak grumbled. “This place is as safe as the Pit of Death. A tile fell from nowhere just now and nearly brained both of us.”

I could see where it had smashed. He had pushed me clear, and I was bruised to prove it. I felt weak and stupid and afraid. I was glad he dragged me away, across the ruined city, back to the camp.

The fires were still alight, but mostly men were asleep. A few sentries prowled.

Darak set me on the rug bed, and pulled off my boots.

“I imagine you still have your woman’s trouble,” he said to me. I nodded. “So I don’t even get a reward.”

He arranged us for sleep with an endearing selfishness, his head on my shoulder.

But I did not sleep. I lay, stiff and cold, waiting for the morning, waiting to be away, yet glad to be awake, for I feared the dreams the city would give me now.

It was near dawn. There is a different scent in the air at dawn; one could tell it blindfold. There came a faint drumming under me. I thought I imagined it, but it grew.

“Darak!” I hissed.

He woke and growled at me. But then the earth moved beneath us.

In another second we were flung apart and together. Weapons in the tent, chairs, the brazier, tilted over, and the poles went too, bringing the hide, down on top of us. Spilled coals licked at the rugs, and caught.

In a moment the tent was blazing. It seemed incredibly difficult to get free now that there was no longer any obvious opening. The flames on our heels, we hacked and scrabbled a way out. The ground was still sliding sideways. Stones flew by, and bits of paving lifted and went down.

It settled as abruptly as it had begun.

I stood up. A pillar had fallen across the road, crushing three tents, and putting out a fire or two. The tents, for some reason, were empty.

“We have earthquakes in the hills, too,” Darak said. “This wasn’t so bad.”

Maggur and Kel came running up, and another man who flung water on the burning hide.

I stared back over the city, and felt a pent-up anger and hatred swelling at me, for the moment impotent.

“Darak,” I said, “we must ride now. Quickly.”

He glanced at me, and nodded. “As you say.”

But he made no great hurry about it, and the men, as always, took their cue from him. Even the nervous dallied. After all, they had spent a night here, and were still unharmed; a little more delay could make no difference.

Finally, the caravan moved, and the sun was up, burning a round white hole in the sky. The horses were restless, frightened by the quake, and still uneasy. Men ate as they rode, throwing back bones to lie among the bones of the city.

It took an hour to get through the length of it, and all that time I felt some menace on every side, and it seemed we were going so slowly. Overhead the light turned gradually yellow as a rotten peach. The horses tossed their heads, and drew back their lips silently.

Suddenly the threat was very close. I seized Barak’s arm.

“Ride fast now, or we will die here!”

He did not take his orders from me, but this he took. He knew me now. He turned and gave the jackal’s sharp bark which was their signal for danger and speed, then dug in his spurs, and struck my horse across the flank.

The horses needed little encouragement. They bolted, and the others behind bolted too. The wagons ground and roared after us.

And at that moment, the city rose against us. Or against me alone, perhaps.

They called it the “earthquake” afterward, but it was not. The earth drummed and rumbled, it is true, but nothing fell except the last wagons, because the paving heaved up and tilted them. At first there was stillness, and then a wind came screaming across the city toward us from both sides, and the wind never blew two ways at once that I had seen before. Stones whirled up from inside the city, pebbles and little chips, and then big blocks and gigantic tiles, and all of them were caught up in that wind, and hurled at us.

The tops of the pillars seemed to fly off and fling themselves too, and huge pieces of roofs. The horses screamed and reared and plunged, the wagons leaped and went over. Metal chests of weapons crashed on the road, and knives and daggers fell out in a silvery rain. I bowed my head against my horse’s neck.

Behind me, Kel squealed as a missile struck straight through into his brain and killed him. The yellow light ran past us like water, and I thought I should be dead in an instant, but I did not understand death, only the pain, and so I thought of it with terror. Flying stuff nicked my face and hands with stinging chisels.

But we were on the outskirts of that place of bones, Kee-ool, the Evil One. Suddenly the ghastly hail dropped back. I heard the prolonged rattle of it as it settled. Our horses stopped still on their own, sweating. I turned and looked.

Behind us, the way was littered with bits of smashed stone. Two wagons were down, dead horses stretched out in front, and dead men and spilled knives scattered about them, like broken flowers on their graves.

Darak wiped the blood from his face.

“Gleer, Ellak, get your men and come back with me. Bring your horses.”

“No,” I said, “no, Darak.”

He ignored me.

And the city ignored him. This, then, had been for me. Or perhaps it was over.

He and the scared looking men cut the dead horses free, got one of the wagons up, and bundled new horses into the shafts. New men got onto the box. The other wagon was completely wrecked, and so the stuff in it was unloaded into other wagons, and onto spare ponies and horses. Nothing was left at last, except the dead. I could see Kel, lying only a few yards behind, among the last columns. I did not dare go back to him. Maggur left me, and went to Kel, and picked him up. He carried him down to the wagon, and there he was burned with all the rest.

After that Maggur was very silent, and Darak, when he came back and mounted beside me, looked grim and angry. It had been a long and unpleasant task. The sun was high above the yellow cloud.

“There’s a burnt offering for your fellow gods, goddess,” he said, jerking his hand at the black smoke.

“Another burnt offering. They’d like a libation, too, perhaps,” and he spat, then rode away from me.

4

There were three days more before the day which was an owl, and I recall them very well: the cat, the dromedary, the ape. On the day of the cat, the blood stopped flowing from me, and the other symptoms of fever and weakness cleared with it. On that day, too, Darak had ridden on, ahead of the caravan and away from the road, with a few men. He was gone before I woke. I did not see him that day, nor at night. The day of the dromedary the caravan, too, wound off the road, the charge of Ellak now, and we made toward the distant mauvenesses I had seen on the eastern horizon since Kee-ool. To leave the road was a relief to me. The dreams stopped; but I had other nightmares now, things I could never properly remember when I woke in terror from them.

The evening of that day, Darak came back. He had been to light the beacon signal which would summon the tribal chieftains. He spent that night with his men, at some dice game, and later with one of the women. That night I dreamed too, in his tent, and I thought it was another of the old dreams, but it was not. I was beautiful then, my white hair roped around my head, and falling in five great plaits wound through with emeralds. I recollect this so clearly, but the rest not so well. I know they brought me Darak, and I had them flay him, and when I woke from this I was afraid and struggled to forget it.

The day of the ape, I did not attempt to ride with him. Maggur and I rode off alone into a few miles of thin wood land, where Maggur shot a deer, after crawling on his belly behind it for hours. I do not like the death of animals, and it sickened me then. But it was fresh meat for him and them; we were well received when we rode back in the dusk.

“Darak and I do not lie together now,” I said to Maggur. “Find me a tent away from his place; he may want to take a woman there.”

Maggur looked uneasy, but he found me one, and this was where I slept that night of the ape. There was the kind of misery on me that seemed only a numbness. I did not know what I would do, but it did not seem to matter. I slept deep, and did not recall my dreams when I woke.

The day of the owl, the caravan, at its slower pace, reached the beacon. Rocky hills rose ahead, and here there was one great rock, marooned like an island in the brown sea. On the crown of the rock the fire was smoldering up its thick red smoke. Around the base the tribal warriors and their chiefs waited. I supposed all these here were friendly to one another, in an alliance against other tribal enemies. Mostly they were naked to the waist, their bodies hard and dry-brown. Red and blue tattoos encircled their arms and necks, but on the breast was the symbol of the tribe. I could pick out six different emblems: a wolf, a lion, a bear, a tree done in green, an arrow with a red tip; but the strangest was a round disc, like the moon in an ancient picture, with a five-pointed star fixed in its center. They wore dark clothes and hard leather boots, no jewels except perhaps in a metal armlet. Maggur had said they believed jewelry to be a hindrance in battle; an enemy might catch a man by it, or by the hair—and this they wore very short, or else bound in a club at the back. The chiefs were not so different from their men. They had their standard-bearer near them, a sash of scarlet cloth or green or blue at the waist, and one or two wore some plain ring or armband which was a mark of their little kingship. The chief of the star tribe wore a gold circlet around his head with a white glassy gem, probably quartz, set in it. He seemed to be overlord of them all, and rode forward on his big brown horse to salute Darak like a fellow prince.

They spoke the same language I had heard in the village and the hills, but with a different accent and many corrupted or abbreviated words.

It was very formal, this talk between two kings. It was difficult to see if Darak were amused at all, for his face was iron-hard. I was not standing near but some way off, by my horse, yet suddenly the star chieftain’s eyes flicked around to me. He looked for a moment, then raised his right hand, incredibly saluting me too.

“Honor to you, warrior-woman,” he called, and he was not using the same tongue now. This was something older and more complex. I saw Darak’s head snap around to me. He would laugh at my embarrassment if I did not know how to reply, but I did. As with the villagers, I understood at once every pattern of the Plains speech, without thinking.

“And to you, my father,” I said clearly.

The chief nodded. He looked back at Darak, who seemed surprised.

“I did not know Darak Gold-Fisher had a tribal woman in his guard, and a warrior too. We have not had such a one born into our krarls for many years.”

I had realized they might think me one of their stock because I wore the shireen, and I wondered what they would make of my man’s clothes and the knives I carried. Apparently they held women who fought in high esteem, and treated them as men, which was a unique honor in such a society. It would not even be essential for a woman warrior to go masked; that I did only increased their respect for me.

It was etiquette now that Darak and his men ride to their encampment or krarl, and feast with them.

Only then could any business transaction take place. As the chief and Darak began the procession, two of the star warriors came riding toward me. They gave the salute the chief had given.

The elder said: “I am Asutoo, the chief’s son. You will bring joy to us if you will ride by our side.”

I could not refuse. Besides, there was bitter enjoyment in me that I was receiving as much attention, if not more, than Darak. Maggur looked anxious as I went away between them, but I was safe enough.

They were both light-haired, handsome, younger than Darak, solemn in a way only the young can be solemn, yet matured by the hard life of the plains, and the battles they had fought. They carried many scars. Asutoo spoke courteously to me as we went along, the other was silent. He was a younger brother, it seemed, and as such must keep quiet. Asutoo asked me my tribe, and how I had spent my life, and what battles I had seen. I lied that my mother had left me for the hill wolves when I was born because I was sickly, as I knew that the tribes exposed their weaklings. Later, villagers had taken me in, and I grew miraculously stronger with the years, and finally adopted the shireen, and rode with Darak, not knowing which was my tribe.

“Men are foolish,” Asutoo said gravely, “but the gods saved you, and gave you strength for your battles.”

He had been speaking in the tribal tongue, and he did not seem amazed that an outsider knew it. No doubt the gods had given me that too. I asked him what the disc and star represented.

He touched the tattoo on his chest, and said: “The sky sign of the gods. Above we see the stars which are the silver chariots of the gods. Sometimes they ride to earth in them, and the ground burns black. The father of the father of my chief was visited by the gods. They wore silver and must not be touched. Since then we have borne their symbol, and the chief takes the Star-jewel on his forehead.”

We reached the krarl in late afternoon light, where it lay, a safe three days’ journey from the High-Lord’s Way, the cursed road the tribes would not go near or travel, or even cross, except in the greatest extremity.

The camp was on lower ground, built around a large strip of water where gray-green trees grew. It was circled by a stockade of wooden poles, with men walking up and down, seven-foot spears in their hands.

The six tribes had settled in one place. There were many hundreds of tents, all black; from a distance it looked as if an enormous flock of ravens had settled there. Goats and cows wandered freely, dropping haphazard dung. Some women, tiny as fleas, were washing clothes in the water. Most were cooking at a great ring of fires in the center of the krarl.

We went through the gate, which was iron, and obviously a separate thing from the poles. Children and goats stared at us. The caravan began to split up. Soon, only Darak and a captain or two remained with the chiefs, and I remained with them also, because of Asutoo. We toured the krarl and the large horse pens at the back. This was actually disguised business dealing, for a lot of Barak’s sale here would be barter. We needed horses, particularly since Kee-ool, and these were very fine, all bronzes and chestnuts, and mostly unbroken. Darak grinned, and pointed out the largest of a bunch of females, and the worst tempered.

“That one is Sarroka-Devil Mare,” the star chief said.

“She is bred virgin, and hates the feel of any male on her back, horse or man.”

I knew Darak would not resist that. He must conquer any thing that opposed him. He dismounted, and the mare rolled her eyes and showed her teeth, sensing his intention.

The chief nodded. Two warriors ran around the pen, and opened a little gate into the fenced pasture behind. They called her name, and held out tidbits. It was easy enough to see they had been ready for Barak’s interest. Sarroka would not take the stuff from their hands. They put it down for her, got the gate shut, and vaulted out.

“Take her now, Darak,” the chief said. “You will never get near her once she’s done eating.”

Darak unlaced the black merchant’s tunic, and hung it carefully on his saddle. His brown back rippled disdainful muscle. He went lightly over the fencing, and waited till the mare was finished and had lifted her head. He called her then, and she turned and snarled back her lips. Darak laughed softly, excited by the challenge of her. She stamped and whinnied, then flung around and ran. Darak ran too, so fast he was beside her. As she turned the corner of the pasture field, slowing a little, he caught her by her brassy blowing mane, set the ball of his right foot against her, and swung the inner left leg over, using her flank as a pivot. It was a incredible trick, and very dangerous, but it got him on her back. Darak’s men and even some of the warriors called out their applause, but the mare was mad. She threw herself up and sideways, bucked and kicked her heels, and screamed her furious fear. She could not shift him. He held her around the neck, constricting her great windpipe with his arm. It hampered her breathing, and tired her quicker. Round and round she ran, flagging, like a great bronze wheel running down.

Finally, she was still. Her head drooped and she streamed sweat. Darak slid from her easily. He led her back across the pasture and picked up a sweetmeat still lying in the grass. He held it to her, and she shook her head and would not accept it. Darak let fall the sweet, and climbed out. He, too, glistened sweat, his body metallic. He looked uniquely handsome and very angry, everything about him highlighted by the low sun.

“Well,” he said, “I’ve saved your men some trouble.”

“Sarroka must be yours,” the chief said.

“My thanks, but I don’t want her.”

The chief shrugged.

I hated Darak. He had broken her for the sake of his vanity, and now, because she did not love him for it, he abandoned her. If he had let her alone, perhaps these warriors might have given her up and let her free again.

The sun sank, and the feast began.

We sat around the fire ring on hide cushions, the six chiefs and their sons, Darak and his captains, and I.

Over our heads a canopy drooped its scarlet wings. Women in black robes and young boys served out food and drink. It is the tribal way to hem a boy in with mother and sisters till he is sick of them, and runs off to kill a plains wolf in winter, or catch a wild horse, or go to fight, if there is a war, and so prove himself a man. The women all wore the shireen, but the eyepieces were wider than mine, and often embroidered or beaded. They stared nervously at me, and slipped away to be replaced by others with the next course, all equally curious. The food was plentiful and smelled spicy, but the warriors did not touch the roast meat. The kill had been for Darak and his men only. I ate nothing except a bit of the formal bread they break before each meal, which must be taken if one is a friend. I drank a little of their wine, but that was all. They respected my frugality. Their warriors would fast, too, their chief said, before a battle. I was used to the pains and cramps that came, and they did not trouble me much.

The feast ended, but the drinking went on. They passed around cups of an alcohol made from goat’s milk mixed with the bark of some tree. Darak did not take much of this, but the chiefs and their men drank deep.

The conversation began to move around to bargaining talk after that. I was not very interested in it, it was such a game, the chiefs and Darak beating each other back through impossible conditions to their very last defenses, which were, in fact, what they had intended to settle on all the time. In the end, it was mainly knives they wanted, and Darak achieved horses and a cloth their women made for which there was a demand in the towns. Some money passed hands also, and little bags of dull red counters that were, I think, chips of unpolished precious stones, possibly garnets.

I felt exhausted by this time. The fumes of the wine I had not even drunk had got into my head, my eyes smarted from the fire. Through the smoke I saw seven or eight girls come to dance for us. They wore white shireens, but although their faces were covered, their bodies were almost naked. A thin leather strap passed around their backs, under their arms, to fasten above their breasts with a gold buckle. From these straps hung tassels of white wool, which hid them occasionally but not often. There was a similar arrangement around their hips, and although the tassels were more numerous, and some of them red or blue, they were equally unsuccessful in the pursuit of modesty. Their bodies were lean and brown like their men’s, but they were beautiful for all that.

The chief was courteously asking Darak to choose a woman, and, once Darak had chosen, the other bandits picked what they wanted. Perhaps I should not have been surprised when the chief leaned toward me.

“And you, also, warrior. Which girl for your sleeping place in the krarl?”

I had not realized this, too, was a custom among their woman fighters. After a second, I said to him in the tribal tongue, “You honor me, my father, but though I will fight as a man, I am still woman enough that I do not lie with women. Therefore only do I refuse your gracious gift.”

He made a movement with his hand which meant, “That is fair,” and he said, “Choose, then, a warrior for your pleasure. Such a woman as yourself is held highly in the krarls. No man but will be glad.”

I saw Darak’s face across the smoky glare break into a hard smile. He wanted me bewildered by the situation, stuttering my refusal which he would then have to smooth over with the chief, explaining my basic weak feminine nervousness.

What a stranger and an enemy I had in this man I seemed to love.

I bowed to the chief. I turned and put my hand on Asutoo’s broad naked shoulder. I felt his flesh quicken under my fingers, and was thankful for it.

The chief grinned and nodded several times.

“A good choice. Had I been younger you might have put your hand on me.”

“I would not dare to set my hope so high,” I said.

The ritual was successfully completed.

I would not let myself look back at Darak’s face.

The feast broke up soon after. Boys with torches came to show us our separate tents. I thought Darak started to move after me; I heard a little uneasy sound, and some of the warriors had got in his way. I did not look back as I walked with Asutoo behind the golden tongue of light.

The tent was small but adequate. We ducked inside. There were rugs on the floor, and a stand in which the boy stuck the torch, and then went out. I looked at Asutoo. His face was slightly flushed, his eyes bright. He was a little drunk, but not dangerously so, and he did not seem aggrieved.

“I hope I have not angered my brother by choosing him,” I said.

“I was happy,” Asutoo said. His color deepened further. “It seems strange to me my chief did not see you are a woman too.”

“One thing, my brother,” I said. “You know I will not uncover my face.”

“I did not expect it. The whores will uncover for any man, but you are warrior and princess too.”

He seemed to know me beyond his knowledge of me, even allowing for the formal courtesy of the tribal tongue.

We undressed, the torchlight glittering around us, and, for all his youth, he was well-formed, and economical in his movements. He dipped the torch into the sand pouch of the stand, and we lay down in the dark. I was very careful that he should not realize my physical differences. I was not this time defenseless with love, and vulnerable.

I was afraid I should make him Darak in my mind, but it would have been difficult, and I was glad of it.

He was very different in every way—I had only to touch his clubbed hair, his skin; the smell and taste of him were unfamiliar. The act was pleasure, but there was no true possession. Darak took, but Asutoo borrowed—there is no other way to describe it. Beyond the pinnacle, on either side, hung an expectancy that never quite went out. We were too well-mannered with each other, that is all.

Dawn slid under the door in a white thread.

Outside I heard movement, horses, and shouting, and the sounds of departure to which I was so used. I dressed, leaned over Asutoo and gently touched his face. His eyes opened on me sleepily, and he smiled.

“They are leaving,” I said. “I must go.”

His face changed. He woke up fully, stretched himself, began to dress.

I was at the flap when he said, “Why do you ride with that man?”

There was something in his voice I had not heard there before.

“I am one of Darak’s people,” I said.

“No. You are of the tribes.”

“I must go, Asutoo. There has been happiness between us, but the dawn parts day from night, and this is our parting, too.”

He was silent, and I went out.

They were going earlier than expected. Men were bringing the horses due to Darak, and bales of colored cloth. Food was coming too, and the bandits were eating as they moved about. The chief looked indulgent at this breach of etiquette, for he was well satisfied. The knives and other weapons they had chosen lay in heaps, the warriors pawing among them anxiously. There would be a meeting later, and an official handing out.

Darak was on his horse. His head was thrown back as he poured some drink or other down his throat from a clay bowl. Maggur came striding to me and grinned.

“That one is very angry,” he remarked, not looking at Darak. “He would have stopped you last night, but these naked braves got in the way.”

Darak had turned and seen me. He spat the last mouthful of drink onto the ground, and moved his horse around.

Maggur had found me my horse, and mounted his beside me. Most of the men were up now. It was time to be away. A sense of storm hung in the air.

“Our thanks for your hospitality,” Darak said to the chief.

The chief nodded. I saw Asutoo walk forward, and stand a few feet from his father’s side. He looked at Darak, and Darak pulled hard on his rein so that his horse jerked up its head, and kicked its front legs through a cook fire, showering Asutoo’s feet with charcoal.

Asutoo did not move. He said: “Give me leave, my chief, to speak to our guest and brother before he goes from us.”

The chief, frowning, made the gesture of consent.

But Asutoo did not speak at once.

“Well?” Darak said.

“My words are not for you only, Darak hill-rider. I speak to your warrior, the woman.” Asutoo looked at me across the horses. “You know the little I have to offer you, but if you will be my wife, and live with my tribe, you shall have all the honor you merit. I will not stop you riding to battle; you shall ride before me. You shall not be as a woman in my tent, but as my brother. I will have other wives to tend me. I ask you because I know you are a woman too.”

A pain went through me, sharp as a knife. There was a sudden longing in me to stay, to be his wife, and ride with him, and later perhaps to bear him children, and be a female only, and a slave as the others were. I knew he would love me, and leave me myself. He would let me search out my past and the Green Jade, once I had persuaded him. But somehow I could not speak.

There was a silence. I could not look at Darak’s face, I knew the contempt that would be on it. In a moment he would say to me: “Well, then, take him, and my blessing on you both.” But Darak did not speak either.

The chief said: “Such a woman would bring honor to us. One day, if it was her will, she might bear sons and make our tribe great. I will answer for my son Asutoo. He is a brave warrior, and has killed many of our enemies. One morning he will wake to be chief of the Star.”

Darak wheeled his horse then. He rode back to me, and snatched the rein out of my hands.

“We are honored by your words, chief. But our laws are different ones. This woman is mine.”

Asutoo’s face whitened. His hands clenched.

I wanted only to break away, to say, “No, Darak, I am not anything of yours,” and go to the white-faced boy. But I could not do it.

Darak did not glance at me. His arm went up to salute the tribes and their chieftains, and then he spun us around, his free hand still on my reins even before he had regained his. I had no free will left, he had stolen it, yet I had given it, too. It was so terrible to be in his power, doubly terrible because it delighted me. Anger and joy to have him drag me with him away from all safety and hope of freedom, and to have no say in it.

“Darak,” I called, “let go of him, you will cut his mouth.”

“Don’t tell me, you damned bitch,” he shouted back. The sky rushed in our faces. “I’ve handled horses for three years or more before you broke your egg.”

But he was laughing. Both of us were laughing. I had forgotten Asutoo already, and the ruins of any hopes he might have had, and his shame.

1

We did not return to the road, but moved parallel to it on a newer track. A little beyond Kee-ool it seemed the paving had broken up, and it was no longer fit to ride. An ignominious end for the master-built Way of Kings.

It seemed to be the finish of my troubles. No more dreams and no more strange happenings. Not even any longings beyond what I had. Only the dull hot ride, the jokes, the sense of comradeship, however absurd. And Darak. That was a good time for him too, I think. I do not know if he loved me or not, or how he could, but there was something between us then. I do not forget.

And then we reached Ankurum, the Red-Haired, her feet on the footstool of high rock hills, her back against the low mountains, and beyond her altogether, the sky-touching shapes of the Mountain Ring, faint and far off, their caps already creamed with snow. There is an old legend about Ankurum that the scarlet vine which grows all over her, and will never grow in another place, brings her prosperity.

For a day or so, before we even sighted her, we went through villages and towns that grew in size as we got nearer. A complex struggle of houses, inns, and markets wound up the rock hills to her gates. It should have been an inhospitable region, and barren as the plain, but somehow there were orchards and woods, and fields cut through by little streams. Perhaps they were right to worship the goddess of the vine.

Beyond the walls, the city rose up in banks and terraces, and twisting alleys, carved out of the hillside.

The buildings were almost entirely of stone, a warm yellowish stone like the ramparts. Apart from the color of the vine, which ran wild everywhere, pictures had been painted on house and garden walls, and all over the fronts of inns and drinking houses. Signs swung, crimson, green, and yellow, the symbols of hammers and flagons and loaves. It was midday, everything wrapped in a brass stormlight.

“Impressed by all this opulence?” Darak asked.

I was looking around me, fascinated despite myself at this first contact with the massed bundle of humanity which is called a town. The pattern of it intrigued me, all of it winding upward to the great fortress-house of its warden, who held it in turn from his warden, the overlord of this region. There were laws in this place, and taxes taken regularly in money, not occasionally in sheep and goats. In most streets braziers stood, waiting to light up the dark, but in parts houses grew together overhead and shut out the sky. I noticed horse troughs, and drains to let rainwater away, and I noticed bad smells, too, and side alleys packed with hovels. Not all opulence, it seemed, but I let Darak tease me.

Not that he had been in Ankurum himself before, but he had been in other similar towns along the foot of the Ring. No doubt it was rare for him to visit the same town twice. They would always finally discover they had bought their goods from a thief.

I realized how dangerous this game was that he played when I found his name had abruptly changed from Darak to Darros a few moments after we were in the town. As Maggur told me later, Darak the bandit was too well-known. Darros, the merchant’s son, however, was another proposition entirely. He was an impressive if eccentric figure, daring to bring his caravan through the hills and plains with their cordon of dangers; one who had the favor of his gods. True, merchants here would think him wild and crazy, jealous of his achievement. And then his men would turn out to be such unruly scoundrels, drinking and whoring from one bordello to another throughout their stay. Nevertheless, the cargo was the important thing. Yes, despite his youth and failings, they would find a place in their greedy hearts for Darros of Sigko.

There were not many people about, for this hour they kept sacred to their stomachs. Half the gaudy shops were closed, but the taverns were bursting, spilling raucous gobblers out among trestles at the roadside.

We found a hostelry with some trouble. The caravan was a large one and looked very imposing now, particularly with its black, skull-masked outriders, a fearful product of the trader towns in the north.

At first there was always some man with a hot face saying “No room. Ankurum’s packed for the Games.

Try farther up.”

“What games are these?” someone called the first time.

“Are you barbarians or what? We’ve always had our Games. And now that the new stadium’s built, men have come for miles. Are you barbarians, you northerners?”

A fight might have broken out over this, but Darak, Ellak, and Maggur got the others quiet, and we rode off without any blood or brains spilled to mark our passage.

We soon had it through our heads, in any case, that Ankurum was full, and why. In the wider streets there were even posters hammered up on doors or walls, mostly in pictures or symbols—garish wrestlers, shown blue and orange, and chariots carried along by mauve horses. It had clouded over by now and was raining, and their colors were running all down the gutters. It seemed late in the year for games to be held. Probably they had delayed for their new stadium, The Gigantic and UnrivaledSirkunix of Ankurum, as their dripping artistry called it.

At last we found a place large enough, and nasty enough that it still had room to hold us. The big stone rooms thrummed with neglect and cold. The beds had not been aired in a million years. They lit fires for us, and brought out moth eaten sheets, and began a meal. There were only five or six others there, and I imagine they were residents, not guests. They were old and timid, and crept out of our way like small frightened animals. Whenever I met one—on the stairs or in the dining hall—they slid aside in abject terror; from Darak or the others, they fled squealing down side passages, and all night long their doors might be heard nervously opening and banging shut, as they attempted to scurry to and from the latrines, without seeing any of us. I think they were my initial lesson in pity, but I laughed at them, too.

Those first three days were dismal, black and full of rain. Darak would go out early with Ellak, Gleer, and three or four others, plus about ten men dressed as skull-guards, and pack animals carrying examples of his goods. I was not allowed with him, for apparently the sight of a woman in a merchant’s place of business was an unheard-of thing in the towns. I gathered they were dull times; endless bargaining and signing of papers. The plains’ cloth went easily, but the weapons were harder. At night, when I saw him, Darak would growl angrily at the underhand dealing and cheating by which his agents tried to trick and trap him—they were robbers. It was amusing to listen to his arrogant and righteous fury, he, who had stolen the goods in the first place. But then, he was Darros now. Except once when he rode bare back a mad horse in the marketplace three streets away.

So I spent my days, locked in the dreary hostelry hall, crouched around the fire with the others as they played their endless dice games, or alone if they were at a brothel. The women they had brought with them sulked and ordered endless food, which put too much weight on them. They were as unused to this life of sitting as any of the men. There were a few of us about on the morning of the third day, and, as the hall was virtually ours, Maggur hung up a painted wooden target, and he and I and another man began to shoot against each other with our bows. My bow had taken the damp, and did not do well until I had waxed and resined it. By then there were more in the game, and they had split into teams. Maggur’s team had called themselves the Rams, partly, I think, because three or four of them had just come in from a brothel. The other side retaliated with Dragons, and were a man short.

“Come and shoot for us, Imma,” one of them called. “These bastards have an unfair advantage.”

While the women lazily watched, plucking eyebrows because it was the fashion in Ankurum, and mouthing lumps of candied fruits and sugar-sweets, the Rams and Dragons did battle, occasionally degenerating into fights and wrestling matches on the floor. Maggur was the best of his side, and I the best of mine. In the end, I beat him.

“Dark was the day I taught you,” he said to me. “You’re quicker even than Kel.”

He looked around for Kel’s grin when he said it, then checked as he remembered Kel was dead. There was an awkward silence between us which Darak luckily broke up, coming in early with a lot of noise and an incomprehensible group of people.

He strode at once to me and got my arm.

“Put that stuff away, and come upstairs.”

A man near us laughed at his urgency, and Darak clouted him a casual blow across the back that sent him staggering.

He marched me out of the hall, and up to our long and icy room. I was surprised to find the people he had brought with him had scuttled after us.

“Wait,” he said, and shut the door on them. He threw wood on the dying fire and straightened. He looked irritated and amused at once.

“A sale?” I asked.

“Not yet. Ankurum is worse than a tribal krarl for etiquette. The agent I’ve been dealing with is having what he’s pleased to call a supper tonight. He wants me there, and I gather this is where I’ll meet my customers. It means a few hours tedium, weak wine and nibbly tidbits on eggshell plates. I want you with me.”

“Why? I thought the merchants of Ankurum swooned at the sight of a woman.”

“Only in their weapon shops, it seems. There’ll be expensive ladies present, and I haven’t the time to get tangled with them if I’m to fish my merchants out of the pool. You’re my shield against it.”

I did not want to go, but I saw the logic of what he said. Coolly I asked him, “I am to go like this?”

“Outside: three dressmakers and a woman for your hair. At least you won’t have to paint your face.”

“You think the shireen will not excite comment?”

“Quite an amount, I hope. A beautiful tribal mistress is enough to daunt the most ardent whore. It should be interesting. Besides, you’ve the exquisite manners they adore, though where you got them—”

He opened the door again suddenly, and the women jumped. I could see he had been bullying them.

“In,” he said, “and hurry. Do as I told you and she tells you. She has the last word on it. I want it done by sunset at the latest.”

He strode out, and I saw the male equivalent of the female victims start frantically after him down the corridor to Ellak’s room.

They had brought materials with them, Darak’s choosing, and at first I had thought his gaudy bandit’s tastes would have doomed me to freakishness. But he was a cunning man. He knew at least what not to wear in a merchant’s circle, even if his soul cried out in deprivation. I could see he had even been afraid of his own judgment when he had picked out this stuff. Each cloth shown me was of a plain and muted color, and thereby he had erred the other way. But I found the beauty of the pile at last, a heavy silk, the luminous white of alabaster. There was measuring then, and a lot of fuss. Thankfully, what was elegant in Ankurum was also simple, a sleeveless dress dipped low at front and back, fitted to a little beneath the breasts, then falling in free folds to the feet. There were sandals for these, bleached leather with gold studs, and already one of the women was stitching at some thing, a new shireen, this time of black silk.

Between measurings, I bathed, sharing my bath with the numerous swimming beetles that lived in the sides of the tub.

By late afternoon I was dressed. They had been most industrious, and clever also, as the mirror they had brought showed me. The hairdresser, who had been preparing her perfumes and combs and heating her tongs intermittently in the fire for hours, flew at me in terror of Darak’s ultimatum. She rubbed my hair through with a sweet scented oil, combed and brushed it down, then tonged every strand into cork screw curls. Most of these she piled on my head in loops and coils. What was left, hanging free down my back, twisted like contorted serpents. Most women, she informed me, would use false hair in such a style, but knowing she had no match for the milk-whiteness of mine, she had contrived it without. This was due probably to the thickness of my hair, but no doubt she had earned a little extra for her quickness.

Darak came in without a knock, and the women jumped up in a flurry. He inspected me, then grinned, and paid them rather generously and shoved them out. He shut the door and leaned on it, looking at me.

He had acquired a tunic during the afternoon, black, ribbed with black velvet, again, very discreet, but he looked well in it. There were agate buckles on his new boots.

“You’re beautiful,” he said. He came and sniffed at my hair. “Beautiful,” he said again. His hand slid across the skin of my neck and arm. “White on white. You were clever to choose that. Your smooth skin—it never browns or reddens. Or scars,” he added. His fingers moved again. He remembered even now where Shullatt had stabbed me, though all trace was gone. Suddenly he stood back, his face a little stiff.

“I brought you this.”

I took the piece of silk, opened it. I stared down into a cool green deep; eight oval eyes stared back at me. All of me reached toward it, but I wished, in that time of blindness, that he had not bought me jade to make me see. They had favored jade, and I had not worn what I took from Shullatt since we left Kee-ool.

“Don’t you like it?” He was vulnerable with the giving.

“Yes,” I said, “more than anything.”

“I’ve heard you talk of jade in your sleep.” He came close to me, and fastened it around my throat. So cool it was, eight eyes of water set in shores of gold.

“Darak,” I said softly.

“Darros,” he corrected me, “and don’t forget.” He kissed my throat. “Put on a ring or two, the gold ones, perhaps that gold bracelet Maggur stole for you from his woman in the wood camp.”

I did as he said. It was not gaudy, but added a certain richness to the plain white of the dress. I put on too the black shireen, as beyond the narrow window the sun sank red on the roofs of Ankurum.

Maggur and Gleer and a few of the “guard” went with us, riding the pick of the horses. Ellak, Darak, and I rode in some carriage hired for the purpose, a stuffy rickety conveyance behind two fat ponies. Darak and Ellak fidgeted uneasily in the closed-up interior. Ellak also wore new black, and had trimmed his beard and eyebrows and presumably washed more strenuously than was his wont. He, too, looked handsome, amazingly.

The carriage jolted noisily.

“The rain’s finished. We’ll walk back,” Darak vowed.

2

I suppose to men like Darak, uncertainty is life, and danger the wine of life. Then, caught up in it, infected by his excitement and coolness, I did not really understand the foolishness of what we did.

The agent’s house was at the “garden” end of Ankurum, high up, with splendid views from every window, and terraced walks where little fountains tinkled, and tame, brightly colored birds strutted.

Alabaster lamps glowed in the portico, through which a steward ushered us. There were murals of naked dancing girls on the walls. I could see Ellak restraining ribaldries. Maggur and the others remained outside. It would be a dull evening for them unless they could start up a dice game or a fight with the other grooms and servants abandoned to nearby taverns.

Beyond the entrance hall, double doors led into a spacious room from which other spacious rooms led away. Here, among the hanging garlands of flowers, guests wandered, talking politely to each other, and elegantly sipping wine and picking bits from passing trays of savories and sweets.

Ellak regarded the scene uneasily. Darak looked arrogant with impatient irritation. A servant came to us.

“Darros of Sigko, sir?”

Darak nodded.

The servant, with a flourish or two, conducted us among the guests, most of whom turned to stare, around several ornamental indoor fountains, and up a flight of steps. Here our host, a bulbous shining man, greeted Darak with a cool warmth, and glanced in astonishment at me.

“You’re most welcome, Darros, most welcome. I am so glad that you could come.”

Darak’s eyebrows twitched disdainfully as he smiled.

“My pleasure.”

“And your companions...” The smallish eyes slid back to me. He was fascinated and repelled at once. If I were a tribal woman, I might so easily be uncouth. Plains warriors and their wives were not often seen in Ankurum, but when they came they were treated always as savages.

“This is my lady,” Darak said. It was a socially acceptable term for mistress. Nevertheless the agent flinched.

“I am honored by your invitation,” I said, and he relaxed at once.

“Can it be you come from the north too?” he inquired wonderingly, but his eyes were slipping happily to my breasts.

“Yes,” I said, “despite my low birth among the tribes, my education has been entirely adequate.”

Darak grinned quite openly. “I believe there are people here for me to meet,” he said.

“Indeed. But first, the food. Then the entertainment.”

Darak nodded. “Of course.”

The agent’s eyes rolled around to Ellak now, who had plucked three wine cups from a passing tray, and was draining them one after the other.

The meal was served quite soon, though not perhaps soon enough for Ellak, who fell upon it like a starving vulture. Other guests watched in alarm as he stuffed roast meat into his mouth and mopped up the gravy running into his beard with pieces of the fancy bread. Darak, irritated, and perhaps made a little unsure of himself by the flimsy crystal quality of town manners, made no attempt to check him. He himself ate lightly, and I only picked at things as was usual with me, but Ellak burped his way through every course, with an appetite which would have done credit to all three. I had never noticed this particular appetite before among others who ate like wolves, but here it brought a hush on half the room.

The eating took place in a vast dining area, hung with clusters of candles. The couches were low and cushioned, the tables also low, and everything formed a rough semicircle around the sectioned marble floor. Here jugglers and dancers and acrobats performed to the beat of small drums, the hollow reed sound of pipes.

As the last dishes were removed, last finger bowls and napkins supplied and fresh trays of wine and sweets served, the innermost section of the marble floor sank inward and down. This sinking device must have been a new addition to the agent’s house, and received some applause. Servants ran to the candle clusters, drew them down on their cords, and dowsed them. Slowly, the floor section began to rise again.

The light was very dim, with a slight smoky redness and a smell of incense. The section leveled and I saw what lay on it. A naked woman, her white body painted all over with silver leaves, a net of scarlet jewels between her thighs. As she rose to her feet I saw how she had colored her face—white lips but scarlet glistening lids as if fresh blood had welled from them. But it was the snake which held me. A gasp went up all around. The guests were riveted. A few women squealed, but did not look away. It, too, was red and white, at least as wide as the woman’s waist and twenty feet or more in length. A music began, slow and liquid, dripping from one cadence to another, wrapping itself as sinuously around the woman as did the snake. They were dancing together, winding and twisting about each other. She was one of those that are double jointed; it was no trouble for her to be a serpent too. Suddenly a man came leaping from some door in the far wall, out among the guests. He jumped into the center of the floor, turning somersaults, while the woman leaned before him wound around with the snake, waiting.

My blood ran like ice. I felt I was choking. The man’s body was painted gold. Where had they got this ritual? Had they remembered it, unknowing? Did the corruption still live in them, the legacy of the lost demons who had bred me?

The dance went on, and they were together now, wrapped in a simulation of pleasure, the snake threading in and out between their bodies.

Then the section of the floor sank, the lights were rekindled. The guests stirred, waking, and began to applaud.

“Such artistry!”

“A triumph of beauty!”

The veneer of culture upon their sickly depravity.

I looked at Barak, but he and Ellak were laughing together slyly at it, aroused, but honestly so, not hiding any thing under a cloak of words.

The agent came toward us, receiving congratulations on every hand as he passed.

“Ah, Darros, there is a man I would like you to meet.”

We got up, and followed him from the hot room onto a cool terrace looking out across the town. Little trees in pots swayed in the night breeze. The moon shone high. Already it was late, though lights still burned in Ankurum.

The man was waiting for us, leaning casually on the balustrade. He wore a long robe, black, and without ornament. His hair seemed the only vanity, oiled and curled and very long, that, and the magnificent ruby on his left hand. It matched the glitter in his eyes. A hard, aging, calculating face. I did not trust him much, but neither did he sicken or amuse me.

“May I present to you Darros of Sigko, our famous merchant trader. Raspar of Ankurum.” The agent fussily bowed himself away, apparently undisturbed at being a superfluity in his own house.

The man nodded to Darak and Ellak. He took my hand and kissed it with routine ceremony. He did not ask who I was, or seem particularly interested in me.

“Did you enjoy our friend’s entertainment?” he inquired of Darak. “Quite ingenious I thought it, for all it was so slenderly composed. However. No doubt you would like to discuss business after such a long wait to do so.”

“I should be glad to discuss business.”

“That’s good. I hear you have several wagon loads of metal and weapons, fine stuff from northern workshops. Possibly”—he smiled indulgently—“you are unaware of the extent of my concern in this matter. I am well-known in Ankurum, I assure you. I would naturally not expect you to believe me without some surety, but I can take all your merchandise off your hands at once, without the use of an intermediary.”

“Indeed.”

“Indeed. But before we go any further with this ... I have heard a good many tales about you. You are one of the few men to get a caravan from the north to Ankurum without losing half of it. Did you never encounter any trouble?”

“Trouble?”

“Bandits. I’m told they rule the hills. Not to mention the tribes of the plains.”

Darak indicated me casually.

“You see I have my safeguard against that.”

“Ah, yes.”

“As for bandits,” Darak said, “I know their minds well enough. And I have my guard.”

“Then you enjoy dangerous work, Darros of Sigko?”

Darak said nothing. He looked Raspar of Ankurum between the eyes, and smiled his hard white smile. It was theatrical, but explicit nevertheless.

“I see you do. And they also tell me that you are a great handler of horses. I hear you mastered a wild unbroken one a day ago in the market.”

“I was bred with horses,” Darak said.

“Good. And were you bred with chariots too?”

The stiffness of suspense fell over all of us. This was so much more than idle talk.

Darak said levelly, “Why do you ask?”

“I’ll be blunt,” Raspar said, he who could never quite be that. “I’ve a mind to extend my business concerns to include the breeding of horses. I have my farm already, a few miles outside Ankurum, and from that farm I have got myself a team of three wild blacks. For the sake of my business name, I want some young man—some danger-loving young man who knows his horses as well as he knows his women—to race my team in the Sirkunix. And, naturally, win.”

Darak laughed, short and sharp. It would have been a contemptuous gesture if his eyes had not shone so brightly. Yes, he could not resist. Already he was on the Straight. When he said, “I know chariots,” I was not sure if it were true or not. Then he added: “Also I know a little of the race. Is it the one I hear most of that you want?”

“It is the one.” Raspar smiled. “Of course, there are many other bouts, and many other races—horse alone, and horse and chariot too. But this one is the empress of the races, and also carries the largest prize.” He glanced at Ellak, thoughtful. “Of course, you’ll need to find an archer too. If they haven’t told you, it will have to be a thin small man, a boy if you have one. Tidy enough to keep his feet, light enough that the horses hardly notice him there. Do you have such?”

Darak glanced at me.

“I have one.”

In anger and bewilderment, I stared back at him. I too had heard a little of this race. Ankurum was full of it, and the men had brought it back to the hostelry. The Sagare they called it, and it was death. Six chariots or more, each with a team of three, each one with driver—and archer—whose mission was to disable the other chariots, while under a hail of arrows from his opponent’s men. By the two laws of the Sagare you aimed neither at men nor horses, yet, so easy to misjudge—or judge right if it came to that.

And beyond all this were the four obstacles of the course which represented the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water, each one passed through six times in the six laps of the race. Not many lived after the Sagare. And Darak held both of us so light he would throw both of us into it at the whim of this man, simply because he could not resist his own madness.

“No,” I said. “Darros.”

Raspar looked at me, lifted his hands, laughed.

“Forgive me. But a woman?”

“She can use a bow better than any man under me. And she has the weight, or lack of it.”

“I will need, of course, proof of all this.”

“You shall have it.”

They were talking as if I had no part in it, I, who had the worst part, the victim of a town’s ancient blood lusts, color for the sand of their arena.

“No,” I said again. “Did you not hear me?”

“Your lady is perhaps wise,” Raspar said. “Possibly she has heard every archer rides bare to the waist behind his shield.”

This stupidity angered me even more. I said nothing.

“Well,” Raspar said, “we can discuss it tomorrow. I will send a man for you in the morning. About the fifth hour after dawn? I’ll show you my farm, Darros; it may interest you. And now I must be on my way.”

He bowed to me, nodded to Darak, and went off the terrace, across the candlelit room.

Darak turned to Ellak. “Go and get Maggur and the others out of the brothels. We’ll be leaving soon.”

Ellak grinned and went away.

Darak leaned back on the balustrade, began to pry a plant loose from the marble with his restless fingers.

“You realize,” he said, after a moment, “this man will take all our goods, quickly, and for a high price, if we do what he wants.”

“As his tame dogs would do it,” I said.

“Worth it,” Darak said. “We can’t idle here forever, waiting for some northern messenger to come galloping with news of the ambush at the ford. It would take a while, but thwart Raspar and he might well block our sale long enough for that to happen. Besides, the prize is high. Three hundred gold ovals to the charioteer and two hundred to the archer.”

“The archer should have twice that.”

“The archer would be nothing without the man who holds the team.”

“Find another,” I said. “If you go to die, go alone. I am not a slave-wife to be burned on your pyre.”

“I could have had Kel,” he said.

I turned away, coldness running through me. After a second or so I felt his hand warm on my arm.

“Listen,” he said. “I’ll find another to do it. But you rode with me before, and fought. I would trust my back to you.” I looked up at him and his face was tense. “I don’t believe you can die,” he said to me. He twisted the curls of my hair around his fingers as I stared at him. And after a time I seemed to stare through him, back to the volcano, back to Shullatt’s knife, back to the lightning which struck me at the pillars and threw me, but did not even burn. Another time I might have shut my ears, but not this time.

“We’ll go now,” he said.

He took my arm and led me across the room, the other rooms, across the vestibule, through the portico and the terraced gardens onto the street. I suppose that was the way we went. I did not see it.

3

The night was cool, not cold. Not many lights now, burning in window spaces. Braziers on street corners threw orange color in our faces. The moon too was orange, lower and less distinct.

Abruptly, the thought of the hostelry seemed unpleasant and oppressive.

“I do not want to go back to that room,” I said to Darak.

He turned to Ellak, and the others on their horses, without any hesitation. A shut-in place was not a happy place for Darak in any case.

“Go back on your own. We’re going another way.”

They swung off at once, except for Maggur.

“Well, you great bull, what are you waiting for?”

“Bad to walk alone in a town by night,” Maggur said. Earnestly he added: “There may be pickpockets and robbers about.”

Darak looked quite blank.

“Ah, yes,” he said. “A law-abiding man such as myself forgets these hazards.”

Maggur grinned.

“Ride off, you fool,” Darak said. “I can take care of anything we meet. Besides, there are the warden’s soldiers prowling the streets every night to keep order. I can always call one of those.” He slapped Maggur’s horse on the rump, and it ran off, Maggur still grinning on its back.

So we walked.

It was a strange, quiet time between us. We did not speak for a long while, or even move close together.

Yet he did not seem uneasy with me. Once, when two of the patrolling guards swung by, he put his arm around me. They scarcely glanced at us, two lovers coming home from a supper, perhaps.

There was a little river that ran through Ankurum, stone walled, but very shallow. Things floated on it which the townspeople had thrown in: broken clay bowls, fruit peel, a little white, drowned doll. We followed this river, a perilous enterprise, which meant clambering over walls, rustling across private gardens, and through wastelands sharp with stinging weeds. We were children then, muffling laughter, slipping by the dark windows. At last the river ran underground, its stone mouth narrowing among a group of trees, where flowers turned pale faces up to us from the rank grass.

“Soon be dawn,” Darak said. He pushed me back against a trunk, lifted the veil of the shireen a little, and kissed me.

“Darak,” I said. I leaned against him and shut my eyes. “Darak, I am afraid. Afraid of myself.”

He held me away from him.

“We are all afraid of ourselves,” he said. “Not all of us know it.”

It did not seem surprising for him to understand such a thing, this bandit, who burned now only to risk his neck in the arena.

When we left that place there was the unmistakable dawn scent in the air.

We saw then what made free in the formal and civilized streets of Ankurum. Large frogs burped at us from every garden, some on the walls, staring with their jewels of eyes. On the paving, a colony of snails nibbled at grass between the flags. Two hill foxes, silvery in the dark, their tails stiff, their heads disdainful, padded by us on a main thoroughfare. A little ahead, one waited courteously for the other to relieve itself against an archway. Then both ran around a corner on their ticking paws.

I turned my head to look at a huge white star, amazed at its brilliance and size in the lightening sky. We were in an open place, the buildings around us not very high. I stopped.

“Look,” I said.

We watched the star, which, even though we were still, continued to move. It slid slowly as a blazing tear over the roofs of Ankurum.

“Now what is that?” Darak said softly.

I thought of Asutoo, and his talk of gods who rode the sky in silver chariots, and came sometimes to earth. A sudden terror seized me that the thing would fall into this street, blazing bright, disgorging beautiful burning giants, whose look would melt flesh from bone.

But suddenly, as if it sensed scrutiny, the star speeded, vanished into cloud, and was gone.

We stood silent in the street. My body prickled. I felt abruptly that we were not alone. Very slowly, I turned, looking around me. There were shadows everywhere, yet none of them seemed filled. I shook the feeling from my shoulders.

“Darak,” I said, “let that moving light be an omen. I will ride with you in the Sagare.”

But if omen, then black omen. There was a sense of doom in me. I would go with him because I was compelled by fear. A dark thing in my mind uncoiled itself, length by length. It whispered, soft as the rustle of silk, that he would die in the Sirkunix at Ankurum, having tempted death too often.

4

The man came early from Raspar, and had to wait for us. We had woken late, still twined, in the hostelry bed. Our clothes, everything, lay on the floor. The white silk of the dress, born only yesterday, was crushed and rumpled, torn at the hem and knees from the places we had trampled through, stained brown and green by moss. The jades were still around my neck, and Darak, lying over me, had impressed their shapes into my throat.

When we were ready, Raspar’s servant, a sallow fidgety young man, led us out to the stables. Darak, Ellak, Maggur, and I followed on our horses his fat reddish mare, and were conducted through the winding streets of Ankurum, empty of foxes, out of the Ring Gate, and up into the higher hills.

It was a sharp blue morning, the air very pure and cold.

The mountains seemed closer and more distinct the farther one rose, gray, stippled with white and, lower down, heavy with pines. We passed a small stone temple with red pillars, set up to the goddess of the vine.

The farm was only an hour or so away from the town, but a rich one, producing wine and cheeses besides its prospective horses. It seemed Raspar liked to dip into every pie. The buildings, Ankurum stone, with russet roofs, all matted by the legendary vine, stood around a square court. Beyond were vineyards, and meadows of milk cows, an orchard or two, and past these, in the distance, the horse fields.

A brown-robed Raspar, courteous yet brisk, had wine brought to us, but did not waste time on formality. In an open carriage we trundled out across the fertile acres. He glanced at me and my male clothes quizzically once or twice, but said nothing. To Darak he chatted amiably about the land and its yield.

“The Warden himself will have nothing but my cheese on his table,” he said. “A great honor.” It was obvious that Raspar was not at all honored, simply amused at the boost it gave his produce.

The grape harvest had already begun. Women moved along the terraces, baskets on tilted hips. Ellak eyed them thoughtfully.

Poplars lined the avenue between the horse fields. Blacks, grays, chestnuts turned and galloped away from us, tossing their long heads. We passed among another group of buildings, stables and barns presumably. Beyond was a great open place, shaped in a huge oval, fenced around by a high hedge of stakes. At the center, another smaller oval, this time a raised platform of piled rock.

The carriage stopped.

“The practice track,” Raspar announced smoothly.

We got out, and a man came toward us from one of the stone buildings. He was lean and tanned, sun-wrinkled around the eyes black and darting as a lizard’s. He limped a little, his right side leaning curiously atwist, away from the arm that no longer hung on it. The left arm ended at the wrist. He was still some distance from us as Raspar murmured:

“This is Bellan. He has been my man since the chariots did for him in Coppain two years ago. Now he is my horsemaster. He has run many races like the Sagare, and won all of them.”

Bellan reached us, bowed to Raspar, flicked his eyes over us. I had expected bitterness, hatred even.

Surely there was hatred at least for Darak, straight and tall, the charioteer Bellan would never be again.

But I sensed none of this. He smiled and nodded to Darak as Raspar brought them together. He seemed friendly, yet noncommittal. His voice was deep, oddly pleasing to the ear.

“If the gentleman is ready, I have a chariot for him.”

A groom came around the buildings, leading a plain metal car with three chestnuts in the shafts.

“To cut your teeth on,” Raspar remarked. “The blacks come later. Take one lap.”

A gate section in the fence was pushed open, the chariot and team led through. The horses pawed the ground and shook their heads; for all they were not the wild black prides of Raspar, they were still racers, volatile and nervous. Darak studied them a moment, stripped his tunic, gave it to Ellak, then leaned on a carriage wheel while Maggur pulled off his boots.

Bellan gave a small approving grunt.

Darak went in at the gate and around to the horses. He fondled them a little, talking to them, then, apparently satisfied, he mounted the chariot. He unwound the plaited reins from the prow-boss, shook them out, flicked them, and the horses started forward. They were badly matched for a team, and moved unevenly; the chariot bumped, but Darak had their measure in that second. The right outsider he let alone, the left insider he pulled back hard, and the center horse he slapped lightly with the rein, making him start ahead. The chariot moved, slow at first, little more than a walk. I saw him shift, getting the balance of the car, his bare feet testing with their own senses. The unevenness flowed from the three chestnuts as they felt the guide of the reins, compelling or restraining. They settled, joined, and he began to give them their head. Halfway up the track the reins moved slack and tautened, and abruptly they were galloping. I saw Darak had indeed known chariots, though where or when I did not understand. They seemed one thing now, one flying thing, a unison of movement. Dust clouded up, acrid gold in the sun light. I glanced around. Ellak was grinning, Raspar stroking his chin, smiling slightly. Bellan, at the stake fence, was leaning forward. His eyes glittered, at the same moment almost unfocused. He was breathing fast, nostrils flared, his feet restless, the ruined left arm twitching. He, too, rode the chariot.

They took the turn, light and sweeping, a bright blur behind the rock platform, which represented the Skora of the Sirkunix. The second turn, and through the dust billows, the straining copper power held back. The chariot slowed and stopped. Darak looked at us.

“Good horses, Raspar, but ill matched.”

“I know it. You’ve earned better.”

The chestnuts, angry at this abrupt terminus of their flight, started forward again. Darak pulled them hard, and the groom ran in to release them and lead them away.

Darak came out of the enclosure, his brown body slightly whitened by the dust.

“Well, Bellan?” Raspar asked.

“Yes,” Bellan said. He turned to Darak. “A man for chariots has a look to him, like the lion in the desert—well-hidden, but easy to spot when it moves. Have you never raced before?”

“Not in a stadium. There was a track at”—Darak hesitated, not wanting to name any place he had visited in the past—“at a town I stayed in. I had time on my hands.”

“Yes,” Bellan said, “a god’s gift is on you and you play with it. You are a charioteer, but rusty. Like a good wheel, you will need much oiling before you are ready. But still, a good wheel. Now I will let you try my blacks, and see if they like you.”

They had brought them already. They were amazing in the sun, unreal, three animals carved from a single jet, highly polished to a silver gleam, with rubies set in their nostrils. They stood quite still, but there was nothing quiet in them. They were waiting, tensed and dangerous.

“Introduce our friend to them, Bellan,” Raspar said.

“With your pardon, I’d rather he introduced himself.”

Darak shrugged. He went forward, steady but not slow. A ripple ran through them. All three heads tossed almost simultaneously. Darak laughed softly. He was seduced already. He did not slip around to right or left, but walked on toward the middle of the three. The horse lip drew back, and the other two snarled also. Front hooves lifted a little way, unsure. Darak’s hand slid, firm and caressing, across the satin muzzle. Stroking, he drew the dark head down, whispering. It was sensual, almost sexual, strangely beautiful. The horse nudged his shoulder. The other two on either side extended their faces to receive his attention.

Bellan chuckled.

“Very good, very good, my Darros.”

“One brain in three bodies,” Darak said. “Is that how they take the track?”

“Try them. They will go with you now. Twice only mind. We shall need them again, and they must not be tired. Besides, we have much to discuss together.”

The groom put them between the shafts, arranged their harness. Darak was in the chariot, impatient to begin. The blacks quivered, vibrant. The groom ran out and shut the gate. The reins flickered and drew straight.

The first time had been flight, but this was fire. Black fire leaping through oil. The horses stretched forward straining to catch the very shadows they had cast behind them on the previous lap. Darak stretched forward also. Too fast now to see clearly, only the curve, the impetus, orgasmic, unstoppable, making the world a frozen thing, transfixed around this core of speed. I felt I must run with them, to be still was blasphemy.

“Enough! Stop, you Sigkoan dog!” Bellan roared out.

The chariot flared, simmered, slackened. The horses trotted back around the turn to us.

“Did I not say two times, no more?”

Darak grinned.

“They and I forgot.”

“They and you must learn to remember.” But Bellan too was smiling.

Darak bowed, left the chariot, and, taking the light rugs the groom had brought, slipped them over each horse himself. They nuzzled him.

Ellak seemed surprised. He had not heard his leader take smilingly the orders and insults of any man before. Perhaps he had been expecting a fight; he looked bewildered, but his attention was distracted by a pretty girl coming out with cooled wine for us.

“There is much you will need to learn,” Bellan said, “and the black ones also. We must work on that.

You know a little of the Sagare. By the gracious foresight of my master, you will know more of it very soon.” He nodded at the track. “Earth, air, fire, and water. A race of joy and fear and hate. But before that. Your archer.” He glanced at Maggur, at Ellak, who had drawn off a little with the wine girl. “These men will be too heavy. The team do not need to love the archer as they do the driver, but they must be able to suffer him.”

Raspar said, “Darros has suggested his lady rides with him.”

Bellan looked astonished.

“A woman? Graceful in bed perhaps, but in a chariot as clumsy as an ox.”

“ I am Darros’ archer,” I said.

Bellan looked at me, intense and interested for the first time.

“You? I thought you a tribal boy. I see you’re not. I beg your pardon.”

“Only women of the tribes wear the shireen,” I said.

“Indeed?” Bellan was not concerned at this mistake. “Do you shoot?”

“I am Darros’ archer.”

He assessed me fairly now.

“Small. Good weight for it.” He half turned and shouted for the groom who ran up at once. “Arrange the target. And get a bow and plain arrows.”

I thought I was to be tried on firm ground, but this was not the case.

The horses were uncovered, Darak was in the chariot and I up behind him. Bellan limped after us.

“What do you think now, my three songs of night?” Bellan asked the team. He rubbed his face against their faces and they responded at once. Then he moved to the chariot’s back. “Take off the boots. You must feel the life under you, the life of the chariot. Your feet must be like hands and heartbeat to hold you steady. I’ll get you sandals; your soles will be too soft for this as yet.”

“My feet are hard,” I said. I stripped the boots. The day was warming and the metal layers of the floor were hot from the sun. I felt giddy with tension, the air around me fragile as cracked blue glass. They handed up to me the bow and long flighted arrows—I had not known what they meant when they called them “plain.” I would learn later.

The groom came up and fixed a metal bar against the open chariot back, about level with my waist, then locked it into place.

Two men on ponies rode onto the track behind the chariot, facing me. Between them they carried, swinging on a cord, a large oval wooden target, marked with patches of dark blue, yellow, and red.

“When the chariot is at full stretch,” Bellan said, “aim for the colors of the target. Blue is best, being hardest to see, red fair, and the bright yellow passable.”

Bellan moved out of the enclosure. The gate shut.

A jolt. I took it. A second jolt and I was flung against the metal bar, almost winded. Damn Darak. I heard him laugh.

“Courage, Imma.”

My feet balanced on the moving thudding floor, apart, over the backs of the wheels. I braced my body, taut against the metal, and waited. We were going fast now. The dusty ground whirled past, fizzing with speed. Behind, in front of me, the ponies galloped, the target swinging. I drew up the bow, steadied, aimed, fired. The arrow went wide. Hair blew forward around my face from speed. I would have to plait it or club it, like the warriors of a krarl. Again I aimed and fired. The arrow nicked the board and flopped in the dust. The chariot was still incredibly gaining. Another jolt that almost pitched me forward over the bar. I reeled back against the metal side, blinked my eyes clear of dust, took aim, and shot. The arrow lifted, came down, and caught red. I straightened, then relaxed my knees a little. I had more of the feel of the jouncing floor now. I leaned out over the bar and took three blues, one after the other. “Darak,” I said, “three blues, one red.” He did not hear me.

The ponies gained on us. I filled most of the reds, many blues. Ahead of us. I swung around and fired from the side. The rest of the reds. We passed. I took a yellow and two blues.

Bellan waved us down.

I left Barak with the horses and walked back to them. The target bristled like a porcupine. I had left five blues unscored. “I see you did not really bother to try for yellow,” Bellan said. “This is very good. I have splendid archers among my horsemen here. They do this for sport. They score perhaps three or four blues, fifteen reds. You have twenty blues and all twenty-five reds.” Raspar smiled.

“I will leave you in Bellan’s charge,” he said. “Perhaps you’ll dine at my house this evening?”

5

So our days formed a new pattern, a strange pattern, one strand wildness, one strand business, and one strand elegance, and the three plaited together.

The wildness was the practice track. That first day with its horse sweat, metal sweat, pepper of dust, and back-breaking, bone-bruising exercise, was merely the prologue to skill, discomfort, and danger.

Bellan was a hard exacting tutor. He would swear as vilely as a bandit when Darak failed to achieve his demands, and Darak would listen, without apparent anger or resentment, and then try the thing again, and get it right. Each night, as he lay on the hostelry bed, I would rub salve into the tear along his spine, where the three blacks, straining at either of his strong arms, had tried to rip his body in half. Bellan, stripped, bore, among many scars, one long hard whiteness along his spine, tough as leather. As for me, my right arm was raw from the weals the shield bracelets had made, holding that bronze monster across my body.

Here I saw the disadvantage in my inability to scar—I could not form protective tissue. Each dawn my arm was healed, but by evening the skin was gnawed open again. Unlike my feet, the soles of which had been like iron since I woke under the mountain, my self-renewing flesh made me vulnerable as a baby.

Bellan did not think any more of it than that I was a soft girl, for all my archer’s skill. He told me to wind linen bandages around the weal marks, and had leather rings set inside the metal bracelets. This helped, but it was still bad enough.

By the third day, when we thought ourselves masters of bow and chariot, Bellan began to wean us to the meat of the thing. I had not yet seen the stadium at Ankurum, or a design of the Straight, when prepared for the Sagare, but, by Raspar’s grace, the practice track became a fair copy. We had Straight, turn, and Skora. Now we learned the pillars of Earth and Air. They were sheer treachery, and, more than the other two obstacles to come, we could only prove ourselves against them in the arena. Earth was an oak-wood wall on wheels, rolled in and fixed in the ground before the race. In the wall were four arches, each wide enough to take one chariot. There would always be six chariots at least competing to get through these four openings; we knew already that this year the Sagare had garnered seven contestants—besides ourselves. Air was represented by two pits, only five feet in diameter, it is true, but stretching down some ten yards. There was plenty of space between and to either side of them, so that a chariot ahead and on its own would manage well enough. But, given a bunch of them, some would be driven into the trap; a horse’s legs would go in and snap; if the back wheels caught, the driver and archer would probably be thrown out despite the bar, down the shaft or under the hooves of the teams behind.

Two days we spent on the wall of Earth, dodging two other practice chariots of Raspar’s, held by Bellan’s men. There were spills, but nothing bad. A man broke his leg, and one team, not ours, ran mad right through the wood—luckily flimsy stuff that did not do much harm. The two days after that we played the pits of Air, dug not so deep, and covered, fortunately, by a light mesh frame. Several times the blacks would have floundered into them, but by sunset of that second day, we had learned the trick of speed or dropping back that would take us clear or leave us last, to catch the others when the stretch was open again.

Water was next, and Raspar did not have the underground springs that bubbled beneath the Sirkunix; instead we learned our lesson hard under the torrents of gigantic tipped buckets swung by chains from above by Raspar’s laughing, jibing servants. My bow and shafts hung wet and useless a hundred times before Darak had mastered it, and I had mastered the art of shield-covering them if he misjudged. And then came Fire.

It was the tenth day, and the Games had already begun at Ankurum. The Sirkunix was near enough the town walls, that in stillnesses during the day, the occasional roaring shout of loud anger or joy would soar up to the farm. It was the wrestling, beast fights, and acrobatics. The races would begin four days from now, and two days from that would be the crowning race, the empress, the Sagare. That tenth dawn, we knew we had six days left alone to prepare ourselves for victory or death.

And so, between those flaming poles, which were the symbols of the pillars in the arena, we rode well enough, because we must.

The farm villa was cool and white, a sparsely but tastefully furnished dwelling, which provided the elegance and business threads in the dangerous plait. Here, the transaction had long since been signed, witnessed, and almost forgotten, it was so light a thing now in this preparation for the race. Darak’s goods were gone. In return he had a handsome price, a price, he assured me, beyond anything he could have hoped for otherwise, while working through an intermediary agent.

“Once we are the victors of the Sagare, we can ride back like kings,” he said to me, but his eyes had the lost, bright, fevered look of Bellan’s now. He was charioteer, mind, flesh, and soul; even asleep, I felt his body quiver, alive with the rush of the chariot. Rarely did he turn to me for love in the dark. He was exhausted; besides, Bellan had warned us both, frank and expressionless.

“If you have sense, you’ll leave each other be in bed till this is over. A man drives from his head, his hands, his feet, and his loins. As for your woman, if you should chance to get her pregnant now, you’re lost. When do you bleed?” he added to me. “Not on the day of the race, I trust?” I told him I did not know. There seemed as yet to be no timing with me, as with other women. “I’ll get you a draft,” Bellan said. “It’ll dry you till the race is over. Women—” He made a gesture of disgust. “If you were not the genius you are with a bow, I’d never have let you near this thing.”

And so, on the tenth evening, the race six days away, we sat with Raspar, the dinner over. Candles flickered, licking light colors from the silver plates and onyx cups. Outside, crickets sounded in the warm dusk.

“You are what I guessed you to be,” Raspar said to Darak. “You held them through the fire. Mark you, they have been trained to look flame in the eye since they were foaled. I have seen men ride into the Sagare with horses unbroken to fire, and I shall see it again. A fool’s trick. It only ends one way.” He refilled his own and Darak’s cup. “I have entered your name already.”

Darak nodded.

“You ride as Darros of Sigko, not as my man. Best this way. Ankurum knows and marvels at your feat in bringing in your caravan. You’re a famous hero. There will be no mention of me, but I’ll have my men moving through the stadium, ready to explain who owns the three fine blacks. That should do it.” He smiled, his friendly, half-shuttered smile. “You said you would take scarlet as your color. That’s very good. No Ankurum man has dared this race, and scarlet is Ankurum’s device—from the vine. They’ll shout for you for that. I believe the bills are already hammered up. And you’ll win.”

Darak grinned, tense, amused, defiant. Raspar glanced at me.

“I cannot see your lady’s face under her shireen. Does she have any doubts?”

“Bellan is a brilliant man for chariots,” I said, “but can we trust his judgment? Has he no longing to be in Darros’ place?”

“You mean some slip of the tongue, lack of advice, through bitterness?” Raspar smiled again. “I see you understand a little of the human mind. Well, you’ve no need to fear. He will want Darros to take that race for a very fair reason. There is a man—Essandar of Coppain—who is entered for the Sagare. It was his chariot that tipped Bellan’s into the Skora at the stadium there. It was not a Sagare, that one, a simpler race altogether, but still dangerous. The chariot axle gave from the impact, the horse inside left fell. Bellan was flung among the team behind. He hates Essandar, as well he might. I do not know all of it, but I gather it was less luck than a personal thing between them, over some girl.”

It was late when we left the farm.

“From tomorrow on you’ll stay here at night,” Raspar said. “I know you like to keep one eye on your men, and, from what I’ve heard about them in the town, it’s just as well. But give your Ellak charge. No more of this riding back and forth. You’ll need cosseting after the day’s work. I have a masseur coming, one for each of you, male and female. Besides, now that you have the mastery of the track, you’ll be on show a little. Some of the Warden’s ladies are coming to watch the famed and handsome Darros handle the team tomorrow, and they may well stay to eat with me. The rich idlers will want to come and judge your form so they can lay their bets.”

As we rode back along the dark road to the Ring Gate, I said: “I told you. Raspar’s tame dogs to do tricks for his customers and patrons.”

Darak laughed.

It would not trouble him, gypsy, boaster, showman that he was. Let them all come and stare, And they came.

If anything, it was worse than all the fire and pain, that anger which must be restrained. I, with the arrow poised, how dear to my soul it would have been not to loose at the three running targets, but at that crowd of fools by the fence.

The curl-haired women in their litters and carriages, shimmering in their snow-white frocks. I had chosen my dress well indeed, for the agent’s supper. White was the most fashionable color among the nobility and the rich. Because, of course, white is so easily dirtied, and only the wealthy would do little enough that it could not be spoiled. With their white, they wore clusters of jewels of every color and in every setting, gold, silver, copper, and a metal they call alcum, a kind of dark gray stuff, that shines with an incredible blue light under the sun. The men were much the same, white tight trousers clinging as a second skin, with built-out shoulders and sleeves slashed red, orange, yellow.

The women, and some of the men also, cooed and sighed at Darak; called him over between runs. He had no time for the men, and showed it, yet despite their sulks, they could see he was a likely winner.

They had spent time at the practice track attached to the Sirkunix itself, and apparently no one there came near the standard to which Bellan had got us. With the women, Darak was amenable. They gestured lightly at me with pale ringed hands, and laughed. Darak laughed with them.

Some men came after me to a corner field.

“Clos and I are agreed. We really must watch for you in the arena. You know the custom—bare to the waist. I beg you don’t hold the shield too close, sweetheart.”

I turned to Bellan, who was standing a little behind me, supervising the rub a groom was giving the blacks. He, I knew, had little time for these bystanders.

“Bellan,” I said, “would it be an insult to my host Raspar to put my knife between the ribs of these two?”

I saw, from the tail of my eye, they backed off, laughing a little nervously.

“Yes,” Bellan said. He grinned. “Alas.”

“Then I must not do it,” I said. Deliberately, I unlaced my shirt and pulled it back, leaving my breasts bare. The two men exclaimed, one flushed, embarrassed. I stood still a moment, while, flustered, they tried to call up something lecherously witty to say, then, unhurriedly, I laced the shirt again. “Now, gentlemen,” I said, “I have fulfilled my duties to my host. Perhaps next time you come to watch, you would wear less jewelry. It tends to catch the sun and flash in the eyes of the horses. In my eyes, too, when I take aim. I might misfire.”

I could tell they took my meaning. They turned and went off, one muttering, “Damned whoring tribal bitch.”

Bellan chuckled. It was the first time he had come near to liking me.

“You’ve a word for yourself, I see,” he said, “but careful. Not good to make an enemy before a race.”

The laugh went off his face. His left arm twitched.

Five days, four days. We were pummeled by the masseurs until our flesh rang. Dieted also—though for me, this had no use—lean foods, and little wine or beer. Even when the day was over, Darak would spend hours with the horses, talking to them, fondling them.

“You and they must be four parts of one whole,” Bellan said. “And you,” he said to me, “you are the black crow on the dead man’s shoulder, jealous for what carries you.” I was handling by then the things they called “spiced” arrows—no longer the “plain” ones I had had that first time. You took what you wanted into the arena, it seemed, arrows spiced with anything you fancied. The most used were corded—a tail of thin rope fixed on the flight; shot in between hub and rim, they would tangle the spokes and foul the wheels. The wheels were a popular target. Hollow arrows, filled with small iron balls, would be fired through, snap on the spokes, and spill their dangerous cargo under the hooves of anything coming after. Yet these had their disadvantages—one would meet one’s own artillery coming back.

There were many other devices, all clever, but the trouble was to make these arrows fly. Now, in addition to allowing for the movement of one’s own chariot, and the movement of the other chariot, one must allow for altered weight, cords that might slew the shaft sideways, or tangle on the bosses of the vehicle one rode—a thousand precautions and difficulties, and more.

Three days, two days. Bellan looked slyly at me.

“With one plain arrow,” he said, “and your sharp eye, you might try for the classic shot. Three times only is there a record of it in the Sagare.”

I asked him what it was.

“To slice a man’s reins in two. The leather flies wide. The control of his team goes from his grasp. He’s finished. Try it.”

Ten times around the turns I tried on one of the practice chariots behind us. But I could not make it happen. The reins flick, move, are never still. I was glad the elegant crowds had gone to the races at last, and were not there to see it.

One day more before that Day.

It had been almost easy till then to shut out fear. The grueling toil, the drum of advice always pounding in the ears, the cruel masseurs like two giant-people, the tiredness, the thick black swoon of sleep with dreams so deeply buried they were not recalled. But that day before the Day, they were easier with us.

We rested late, and not till noon did we go out to the track to try the chariot that would carry us in the Sagare. Black metal, gleaming like the horses, set with red enamel suns and golden vine trails, a queen among chariots, and with the blacks between her scarlet shafts, that perfect unison only an artist of the stadium could have made. Bellan grinned at our praises. The chariot had come from Raspar’s own workshops, after Bellan’s design. In it, riding, fast, fast, we were one thing in all truth; even I, the sitting crow, was part of it. Bellan let us fly on the track, and did not call us back, allowing us for once the clear pure joy of it. But after that wine, the day turned bitter.

The blacks were sent to rest, and Darak and I lazed in the villa court among the lemon trees in pots, and the clambering vines. We played a dice game with Maggur, but were interrupted by Ellak.

Twelve of Barak’s men had gone out into the town, started up a drunken brawl, half-killed a few brothel guards, and were now in the Warden’s prisons. Darak’s face went white. He stood up, sending the dice crashing, and hit Ellak violently across the face.

“You brainless clod, can’t you keep order half a day without me on your back!”

Ellak was used to obeying, but also used to Darak’s justice within the bandit creed. He shook himself, and his hand almost involuntarily slid toward his knife. At once Darak was on him, and the first blow knocked Ellak back against the wall. The second blow would have knocked him clear through it had not Maggur got Darak’s shoulders. Darak’s anger settled in the instant. He shook Maggur off, turned away from both of them, and poured himself wine, his knuckles pale on the stem of the cup.

“Get out,” he said.

They went.

He drained the cup, then slung it clattering across the court. His whole body twitched with tension.

Looking at his face, always lean and hard, I saw abruptly how much thinner, how much harder it had become. Yes, he was gypsy and showman, but he would run to the horse, leap and ride. No time to doubt or hesitate. His training had been well enough for his skill and body, but what for his waiting, thinking mind?

“Darak,” I said.

He turned and looked at me, his eyes black and bright, with nothing behind them but the burning tension.

I went in, and he followed me. In the apartments Raspar had granted us, I drew off his clothes and mine, soothed his taut body with my lips and tongue and fingers, roused him, and drew him into me, and when the fire had drained from him, he lay quiet and still against me.

“Bellan would be hard on you,” he murmured.

“Bellan would know,” I said.

Soon he slept, and I held him gently in sleep, but now my mind would not be still.

Death, death. Black death, scarlet death. Death red as the vine of Ankurum. Lying so quiet, I longed to scream aloud. In a half-dream I saw those phantoms of my lost race crowding in to seize me, and Darak’s hands, holding me from the lip of the precipice, slipped suddenly from mine and I was gone. Yet it was he that fell. I saw him broken far below. Darak, you are man, human man, wicked but not evil; if I lose you in that place of fire tomorrow I shall slip back into the dark. Let me remember, when you fall, I must take the reins and wind them around my neck so that the running horses snap it. No healing for that wounding, surely.

6

The rest of that day before the Day was hazy; lamplight, a little more wine than usual, the expansive jokes and laughter, the early sleep we were sent to.

It was perhaps an hour before dawn that I woke. I was weeping, and did not quite know why, but it was Darak who had woken me. He was tossing, struggling, crying out in his sleep, and when I touched him his skin was burning hot and running sweat.

“Darak,” I said.

I held him and tried to bring him back gently, but it was no use; I shook him and he would not wake, so I slapped him across the face, once, twice, three times until his eyes came open and he stared at me. At first he did not even see the room or me, only the thing in his mind still; then his eyes cleared.

“Ah, god,” he said. He sat up, then rose, flung open the window shutters, and stared out at the paling darkness. A fresh green smell blew upward from the farm, but the pores of his skin stiffened at the predawn chill.

“What, Darak?” I asked. “What?”

“The chariot and team,” he said. “It and I and they: one thing. Hill country, riding fast, good riding. And then the villages and the lake, that old damned place of childhood. I saw the cloud on the mountain, scarlet. There was a woman up behind me—not you—a woman. ‘The pillars of fire,’ she said. And Makkatt split open. Red, red blood. Fire. Fire everywhere, the villages burning, the chariot burning, riding in the fire, and this woman behind me, cold as ice—”

He broke off. It was so still, only the slight rustle of the vine in a breeze, as it clung on the villa walls.

He was afraid, and he had kept it from himself. Now he knew. To know fear might well be death to this man on this Day. The old superstition and belief still rotten in him—oh, no, that woman was not I, yet also it was, for it was the She-One who rode behind him, with her white mask-face and scarlet robe, in the dreamland of terror.

Again the vine stirred and with it a memory, a thought.

I went to him and put my arm about him.

“Only a dream,” I said. “Dreams mean nothing. I should know that. Today they will be offering in the temples of the gods of Ankurum, those seven that ride with us. To gods of light, gods of battle, gods of archers, gods of horses. But we are riding for Ankurum, not Sigko, wearing the color of the vine. The goddess knows it.” He did not look at me. I said, “I am going to the temple of the vine-goddess to offer, and beg her protection for the honor of her red.”

“Go if you want,” he said. But he was leaning toward my thought. Superstition, which had harmed him, might heal its own wound.

“Come with me,” I said.

There had been no bad weather for the Games. This was a last warm smiling time that came before the rains. But this day was best of all. The dawn was straining green and rose over the rocky hills and the farmlands, a hundred shades of pink on the mountain sides. Birds sang furiously, ripe apples had fallen on the road over orchard walls. The ground was drenched in dew. We wore plain dark clothes; my hair was free and hanging down my back. We did not yet have the splendor of the arena on us.

The temple was very quiet, shadows around it. We went between the lacquered pillars into the gloom beyond.

And there was such a sense of peace there, not like the village temple this, with its close and spicy smell.

There was only oldness here, and quietness, and calm. A long dark aisle, three square stone columns on each side, holding the roof up, and at the end a little marble stand, veined red, where the image stood, in front, an altar draped with a green and scarlet cloth. Strange, should the altar not be bare so the blood of sacrifice could be easily cleaned away? And there should be a drain in the floor to catch it. The narrow door behind the altar opened, and a priest came out. I did not think he saw us, for he carried an iron bowl to the altar, set it there, filled it with oil and lit the flame.

Without turning he said, “Be welcome. May I help you?”

“Yes,” I said, half-whispering in the silence, “we have come to offer to the goddess.”

He turned and beckoned us forward. He had an old man’s face, but composed, kind, and oddly knowing. He it was, I thought, who had steeped this place in its feelings of peace.

“The goddess,” he said, smiling, “does not ask offerings.”

I was amazed. I had seen the temples of Ankurum, with their oxen, sheep, goats, and doves held captive in the sacred pens, ready to be brought for sacrifice, and fill the temple treasury even while they appeased the god.

“What then—?” I began.

“Look in her face and ask her what you want,” the priest said, “as you would ask a kind mother. If she can, she will grant what you ask.”

Darak said coldly, “Your goddess is too gentle for us. We want her help in the Sirkunix because we wear her red.”

The priest’s smile did not change; his eyes darkened a little, that was all.

“If you pray for the death of another, she will not listen, it is true,” he said, “but if you pray for your safety, that would be a different matter.”

I nodded. The priest turned and gazed up at the image. Darak’s eyes followed his, and mine also. She was like a little doll, white-robed, black-haired, the red vine around her brow. A little doll, and yet...

O gentle one, I whispered in my mind, I am cursed and should not speak to you, but be good to mefor my heart is open. If one of us must die, let it be me and not this man—not so much for hissake, as for mine. If you exist, then you know me and my trouble. Take pity on us both and savehim; make him brave, as he is, give him the victory he wants, and if death, let it be quick andclean. For both.

My eyes seemed to be on fire. I lowered them, and at that moment the priest spoke.

“She hears,” he said.

Curious, it seemed he knew it for a fact. Then abruptly he reached up and plucked two red leaves from the goddess’ chaplet, and I saw for the first time it was real, not a painted thing.

He turned and took my hand, and put the leaves into it.

“One for each,” he said.

My fingers closed around them, cool and crisp on my palm. The priest nodded and went away again behind his narrow door.

I looked at Barak’s face, and I saw all the darkness had gone out of it. So it had worked, then.

Superstition against superstition; and yet I felt it too, the joy and release.

We went out and the day was warmer still. I put one vine leaf in his hand. He said nothing, but, as we walked back toward the farm, I knew he was eager, thinking of the chariot, the team, the roaring crowd, the rushing Straight, the glory, and the prize. I did not know what would come of it, but he was Darak again. And this, to him, was the Day of Victory.

He went first to the stables to make love to the black team, eager and restive under their grooming, as though they sensed this was the time. He came in late to eat, a sparse meal, bread, a slice or two of cold meat, wine and water in equal measure. Bellan hovered around us to keep appetites in check. I did not eat—I could not risk those pains coming to distract me—but I had taken what I needed the night before.

Raspar had gone ahead of us to Ankurum. He would have his own fine seat, not far from the Warden’s place. Grooms were running everywhere, and soon the chariot and team were gone too, to the Sirkunix stables for the traditional inspection. We—Bellan, Darak, Maggur, and I—rode after, with an escort of more grooms.

“Every charioteer needs his own army,” Bellan remarked, “on this day of war.”

His own horse, a sturdy bay, he guided only by his knees, the reins looped in the buckle of his belt; but it was his, and knew him.

There were men and women, farmworkers most of them, leaning over walls and fences to watch us ride by. They raised cheers, for now we were dressed for the arena, and there was no mistaking us, or our colors—black for the team, scarlet for the vine. Darak wore the skin-tight black leggings that ended, thong-tied, at the ankles, the black hide belt, with its red enamel clasp, from which swung thick strips of stiffened black hide to mid-thigh—a protection, but allowing free movement of the legs. For the moment he still wore knee-high black boots, red tassels set thickly around the calf. Above the waist theoretically he was bare except for the shield-cuirass, hardened black leather shaped to the body but covering only lower back, abdomen, and ribs, leaving the arms and shoulders free for the team. It was open at the sides, too, held by three straps of black leather with garnet buckles. On the cuirass, front and back, was the scarlet sun burst, which was repeated in turn on the thick black iron armlets which strengthened the charioteer’s wrists. Across his shoulders, looped around his arms, was the blood-bright cloak, superfluous yet glamorous as the tasseled boots. I, the archer, was his echo, dressed the same, except that I had no protection above the waist save the scarlet cloak I wore around me now, and would slough in the stadium. Neither did I sport two armlets, only one to harden my left wrist. The right wrist would carry the black iron shield with its red sun burst, now across my saddle. My hair I wore plaited behind me and wound around itself, secured by scarlet thongs.

When we passed the little temple of the goddess of the vine, I turned to look my thanks. Darak did not turn, but I knew he carried the vine leaf under his left armlet as I did mine.

When we went through the Ring Gate and into Ankurum, the crowds were milling everywhere. They roared and shouted at us—praises, cheers, prayers: “I’ve put a tenth of my silver on you, northerner—get it for me, for the love of the gods!”

Women peered from windows and balconies in the “garden” quarter. Plump, pampered, pretty, they threw out flowers to Darak, yearning in their painted-ringed eyes. Indeed, he looked enough like one of their gods. Handsome, his body deep golden and hard as iron, his face arrogant and proud, and the eyes bright, fearless, self-amused. He could have his pick of them if he should win. But, if not, if not ... a pit, a heap of earth, no song, and no white Ankurum lady to share that bed with him.

7

Things crumble, civilizations fade; only their tokens are left behind them. Perhaps one day they will find the ruins of the Sirkunix at Ankurum, and say it was made by giants.

It was built partly from the same warm yellowish stone that was predominant in the town, but the greater area of it was hollowed out of the rock hills themselves. It was outside the original wall, but a new wall had been extended to wrap it around. From the outside its own walls reared up and up, crowned with round towers, like the ramparts of a fortress. At the town end were ten gates to admit men and women from the various hierarchies of society. At the wall end, the back door of the stadium, there were only five: the Gate of Iron—the wrestlers’ and boxers’ gate; the Gate of Alcum—the gate of the acrobats and dancers; the Gate of Bronze—the gate of duelers and fighters of beasts; the Gate of Silver—the racers’

gate and the men with chariots; and the fifth, at the center of the rest, the Gate of Gold—through which passed the riders of the Sagare. Over that gate, high up, in carved letters that must have been stretched ten feet high or more, was an inscription, Ankurumite, yet with an odd spelling that reminded me of another tongue, close to me, but which I must forget:

MORTAL, NOW YOU ARE GOD

Beyond the Gate of Gold, we rode down a long ramp into red gloom, lit by torches in the stone walls.

There was a smell of horses here, and something more besides, inexplicable yet intense. The ramp took a long while to travel, for it led under the high terraces of the stadium to the level of the arena floor.

At last we emerged in the vast under-rock cavern. To left and right, passages led away to baths, weapons halls, physicians’ rooms, and the stables. Beyond these complexes lurked the other deeper caves—beast pits, and the death crematoria of those who died here without kin. At the cavern’s far end, the long corridor, ten chariots wide, leading out into the open.

Most of the horses were done with their stables now. It was noon, and the Warden would be at his dinner, but in an hour the traditional procession of his gracious self, favored ladies, men of important houses, would amble through this place of strength and tautness, languidly sizing up the form for the last time before all final bets were taken.

The cavern was very wide and high, torches splashing yellow from the walls. There were ten divisions in all, horse high stone partitions, and inside each enough space for chariot, horses, and grooms to maneuver in comfort. Six of the chariots were in place, glittering metal and color, the horses being coaxed into the shafts. In the fifth stall, the three blacks waited, taking their final grooming patiently enough, while behind them the chariot was taking its own. The bodywork and wheels of every vehicle dripped oil, and oil ran in pools along the floor until it reached the drains. The aroma was mostly of oil, metal too, sweat of horses and men, leather, horse droppings, straw, stone, and the knife sharp, knife-bright smell of tension.

The blacks tossed their heads at Darak as he stroked and caressed them, polished ebony, their manes and floating tails plaited so full of scarlet ribbons that they seemed to be on fire.

“You’ve watched the chariot and team?” Bellan asked his chief groom at once.

“Yes, sir. No one came near. There’s been nothing of that sort I know of. Number seven—the Renshan—one of the grays lost a shoe, but it was all in the run of the thing, nothing tampered with I’d say.”

The charioteers and their grooms were everywhere in the cavern, attending the teams, joking, drinking.

“Barl,” Bellan remarked. A man in yellow had sought the Altar of All Gods, in a recess, and was bowed before it.

“Barl of Andum,” Ballan said. “A good driver, not a master. He’ll take second if he keeps steady. Those grays of his have too much temperament.”

The archers were there, too, slight young men, stripped off to the waist already, only keeping their colored cloaks for display. A group were talking together, friendly, it seemed, for men who would soon be at odds. Yet I could tell from their gestures—slightly feminine and spiteful—that this too was all part of the game. They had a feline look. Some of the faces were pretty as a girl’s, and painted to make them more so. Many wore necklets and little earrings, and one had twisted his black club of hair through with pearls.

A rattle of wheels and the last of the chariots emerged from the side passages, three grays first, drawing their purple enameled chariot already, which was then backed into the second stall. Then a blue and gold car drawn by three satin bays. The driver took it into position—six—himself, a big dark-skinned man, hook-nosed, with a long grinning mouth. Eyes, bright and questing as those of an eagle, looked around him, and found what they sought, I felt Bellan stiffen, hard as rock. This, then, was Essandar of Coppain, the man who had sent Bellan into the Skora because of “some girl,” as Raspar had said. Essandar’s grin broadened. He nodded, and raised one hand in exaggerated salute.

It was a filthy mockery. Others sensed it, and stillness fell for an instant in the cavern. Then one of the archers laughed at something, the silence broke, and the incident was smothered. Essandar had dismounted and was seeing to harness. I turned and looked at Bellan and his face was white. I was so fired by fear, anticipation, dread, excitement, and sentiment, I felt his pain strike to the quick of me, but abruptly he strode off behind the chariot to check the turn of the oiled wheels.

The hour of waiting went fast, and besides that, the Warden came early. Surrounded by his red and white liveried guard, he emerged from the passages and stalked up and down the stalls, gentlemen and ladies trailing after. Their elegance and chat had no place here; even they seemed to know it and did not stay long. Even so, the Warden, portly, handsome, and much-ringed, had a gracious word for all. By the blacks he smiled and nodded.

“Raspar’s brood. Very fine. And you are the young merchant-adventurer, are you not? Darros, is it?

Well, well. Commend me to your groom. Fine work, all of it.”

The ladies lingered a little longer, keeping nervously away from the “terrifying” horses.

“I shall not take my eyes from you, Darros; you are quite the most beautiful man in the Sirkunix. You should have a sculptor cast you in metal—just as you are now. Oh! How I wish they wouldn’t shake their heads so! Such magnificent devils, I can scarcely stay near them any longer.”

After they went, the tension grew taut as a bowstring. Only the wait now for them to gain their seats, place their bets, and then the stadium trumpets, the summons, the beginning. We were all mounted now.

Still, poised for that sound. The horses felt it too, restless, nostrils flared. The last grooms scurried and withdrew. Bellan checked the chariot once more. His face was as pale and as set as any of the faces of the drivers and riders. He nodded at Darak, at me.

“No last questions? Good. Remember what I told you; build your speed, don’t snatch it, give her the weight on the left when you pass the turns alone, right when in company. Yes,” he said, soft, to the three blacks, “you will do well today. Now I have a son and daughter.”

It came then. That crack of silver sound, terrible, wondrous, irresistible cry to the heart and the guts and the soul.

Every chariot started forward. I leaned back across the bar to Bellan as we started forward too.

“Bellan,” I called.

He trotted to keep up and listen.

“If I can,” I whispered, hoarse, my mouth full of fire, “that blue one—if I can, I will take him for you. Not clean, not the shaft. Somehow, as he served you.”

He dropped back, and the chariots were moving fast, the quick parade trot.

Into the dark; vague torch shimmer, eight pieces of a single front moving forward. Then the dim glow—the ten openings ahead, all mouths of the Gate of Love where the marble god stood leaning out above us, over the Straight.

Like birth, moving toward the light.

Stronger, stronger, burning light, white, gold, blue—

We were out.

A roar, thunder, the sea, a great sound going up all around, because they saw us now, their gods, who had come to be beautiful for their ugliness, achieve the victories they would never know, and die for their sins. The light was all around now. Above, blue sky pressing on the tops of the stadium and their round towers. On every side the steep banks of terraces alive with house banners, and the colors of the chariots. The Straight, so wide, white as yet with its fresh sand, one great dancing hall for death and joy.

At the core, the Skora, a platform of stone, ringed by its ten-foot pillars, each plated with gold, each alight at the top with a crest of flame. At the very center of it, the eight markers, one for each chariot, each with their six gigantic arrows—one for each lap—each flighted with the color of the chariot they represented. One arrow would be pulled down for every lap that chariot completed.

As yet, the obstacles of the course were not set up. First we must parade, and let them see us as we were—still, whole, and in our pride.

That thunder, that roar now resolved itself into individual shouts and yells, and over it, the voices of the Speakers who called out the charioteers’ names and towns countlessly along the way, so all might hear.

Color white, team of matched chestnuts: Gillan of Soils.

Color purple, team of unmatched grays: Aldar of Neron.

Color yellow, team of matched grays: Barl of Andum.

Color black, team of matched dapples: Meddan of Sogotha

Color scarlet, team of matched blacks: Darros of Sigko.

Color blue, team of matched bays: Essandar of Coppain.

Color green, team (mixed) of two grays, one chestnut: Attos of Rens.

Color gray, team of unmatched bays: Valdur of Lascallum.

It was not quite a whole lap. We rounded the turn and came to that point above which the Warden’s gallery is set. This is called the String, the Bowstring to give its full title, and here a rope was stretched across from Skora to terrace bank, and held taut by two pulleys. At the Warden’s signal it would lift and the chariots would fly free like arrows down the Straight; until his signal, none might move.

Here we drew up, gave our salute to the Warden, and here, again, we waited. First, from a door in the side of the bank, the wall that was the Pillars of Earth was wheeled out ponderously. It took a team of twelve horses, harnessed two by two, to drag it into position across the Straight. It stood now just on the edge of the turn of the Skora directly in front of us—it would be the first obstacle we should meet. It looked as solid as an oaken cliff. Nothing could collide with it and remain in one piece. The gates were adequate to admit one chariot only, and, of course, there were only four of them. The crowd cheered as the great metal stays locked into place. The horses were released, led on, and harnessed to the stone blocks which covered the natural springs under the arena. This operation was partly obscured from us by the Pillars of Earth, and besides, it was a slow business. Voices yelled advice and complaints from the terraces because of the time it took. And then the blocks were free—and up, up, shot the cascading water which normally, prevented by the cover, ran down and away into its pits. There were four of these vast falls plunging up and back, with space enough between them, and a strong enough mesh over them, that if a chariot rode into them, it could not fall through. Nevertheless, the weight of that rushing water was terrifying. The twelve horses went on, this time to drag the blocks from the double Pillars of Air, five feet around, thirty feet down. We could not see this at all, for it was hidden completely by the Skora, but a cheer went up again, and the horses were led away. A team of men brought in the last of our enemies, and, turning around in the chariots, we saw them clearly, three vast pillars of wood, coated a foot thick or more with tar. They were locked into their places and the crowd held its breath. Out of the door in the bank, a young man came running. He was lean, brown, and on his head was a wig of long orange hair. In one hand he held up a flaming brand, and ran with it almost the whole length of the Straight until he came to the Pillars of Fire. Then, with a cry echoed and reechoed by the packed terraces, he struck one pillar after another. Up they went like yellow candles, spitting, stinking, and smoking, sparks flying between them in a net. The boy with the torch leaped sideways to the bank, where another door was opened for him, and vanished.

A trumpet sounded. The arena grooms ran out and stood waiting, one at the head, one at the rear of each chariot. The charioteers stripped their boots and cloaks and slung them down to the grooms; the archers did likewise. It was very quiet, but as I stripped my cloak a sound went up indeed—exclamations, some laughter, yells, and calls. Apparently not all Ankurum knew the scarlet chariot carried a female archer. The other archers along the line stared at me, one or two in open distaste. Essandar, sixth along and beside us, threw back his head and laughed ostentatiously.

I took my bow and slipped my shield onto my right arm, and a man’s voice sailed clear down to me from the crowd.

“That’s it—you guard those beauties well, girlie!”

This caused a riot of mirth. I turned to where the voice had come from and gave him the salute we had already accorded the Warden. They roared and clapped for that.

And then again the trumpet, and again the stillness. Great, great stillness.

The Warden rose, holding up the golden rod.

A moment—so hushed I heard a bird shrill high in the sky over the stadium.

Death? Now, death? Or what? Or what?

The golden light blistered in the air. Poised.

Then fell.

8

The String is a deceiver as it lifts between its pulleys—you feel you must wait for it, but there is no need.

The moment it cleared a certain height, the three blacks, trained to it, dropped down their heads and started off, Darak and I bowed low behind them. This is such an obvious trick it is surprising not all the charioteers had learned it. Essandar knew, Barl the Andumite, number four the black Sogothan, and seven the Renshan green. So the five of us leaped ahead, and the unstoppable wheel had begun to turn.

There is no time then to fear, for yourself, or another.

Wide white thunder underfoot, the terraces an abstract of color rushing by on either side.

I felt the first arrow before I heard it. The Sogothan archer on my right—pretty boy, a young lynx. Neck and neck, the blacks as yet not at full stretch. It was for our bodywork, to loosen the plates. I got it on my shield before it struck. The boy’s face seemed startled at my quickness, a pale blur now, pulling behind.

Ahead, the gates were rushing near, those four open mouths. Essandar had drawn to the left, across the Renshan, in a spurt of speed, crowding to get the first gate, the best place because it was nearest the Skora. The Renshan, pulling hard away to avoid collision, reared toward us, his team plunging and out of control. Darak, swerving in his turn to avoid them, took us fast as a whiplash across the Andumite’s path.

Dust clouded. I could not see back. I tossed an arrow off my shield, and in my turn fired blind along the Straight behind us and struck nothing. No time for more. The gate. Our swerve had cost us a lead—gray Lascallum was on our backs to the left, the Renshan, recovered, thrusting behind, while the Andumite had swung sideways and was headed toward the second gate. Essandar, beyond the chaos, could pick his gate with ease.

Damn them. The Lascallumite, the Renshan, and now the Sogothan were all trying for the third gate, as we were. The Lascallum bays were in front beside us, the other two a fraction behind. The gray archer was poised to take the turn, his bow slack. I drew a corded arrow from the pouch in our chariot’s side, leaned over and down to them, and fired into their wheels. Light! The whirling scarlet serpent caught.

“Hold! Hold!” I heard Valdur scream, dragging on the bays’ wide mouths. The wheel was fouled, tangled, and abruptly stopped, the other wheel, spinning furiously, dragged the chariot sideways. Spokes snapped. In a kind of slow motion, the chariot keeled, spun leftward, and pitched over. The Sogothan and the Renshan running behind, split to either side to avoid them, misjudging the gates, and pulled back to avoid collision. My back to Darak, my shield in front of me, I felt us take that terrible turn, free, between the oaken thews of the third opening, Barl of Andum a fraction ahead through the second, Essandar already beyond the first.

Three birds, free of earth to fly among water. Blue Coppain, yellow Andum, scarlet Sigko. Barl’s team were running at full, very fast, close to Essandar now, but the grays were skittish, one could tell it. The blacks were going fast, but not yet at their limit. Darak was letting them out, bit by bit.

Through the gate behind rushed the Renshan and the Sogothan, and after them purple Neron—and last—white Soils. Lascallum was gone. I had heard the groan of the terraces, and now boys had pulled down the eighth marker with its gray-flighted arrows, and taken it away. Only seven now.

The water was a silver roar. Already the fume spat in our faces. The blacks lowered their heads in disgusted pride. We were a target now indeed, vulnerable; judging the water, with four behind us who did not need to think of it quite yet, only of us. A rain of arrows came flashing down from the Sogothan and the Renshan. Some struck the plates, and one loosened and dropped off, leaving the metal struts of the chariot bare. Already we were going between the water, on that second curving turn. It was a clean ride, perfectly judged. And now. The Renshan was first to follow—some distance behind. I fired high, very high, for it must go far. The arrow with its scarlet tail flew fast, and plumeted directly before the racing grays as they took the turn. Startled, unstable as I had assessed them, they flung up, prancing. The back wheels slid to the right, and they were all under the torrent of the third falling pillar. The horses neighed, floundered, and swung backward, forward, and then right around to threaten the Sogothan coming up behind. The black chariot swerved, and the black archer fired some shaft among the wheels that finished the green. I saw it jump and go over, the boy on the back scramble clear and race toward the safety of the Skora, across the track of the Neronian and Soilish teams.

But we were free again now, a chariot length behind Andum, both of us some way now behind Essandar. The boy archer in the back of the blue lounged, haughty, not bothering to aim at us. You could hear them from the terraces now, the frenzied shout, “Coppain! Coppain!” And under this the cry for Andum. There was another cry too, lower, less distinct—not for Sigko, but for a name: “Darros! Scarlet Darros!”

There was no bunching on this Straight; we took the gaping black nostrils of the Pillars of Air courteously, and swung around that first lap toward the fire.

Watch the Neronian. The speed was building there as it was with us, from slow, powerful engines.

Already gaining on the Sogothan, who in turn gained on us. Acrid smoke was curdling around us. Difficult to see clearly. The horses coughed. Around the brink of the turn, and the three blazing torches flared at us. You may train a horse how you will, he will never like fire. Barl’s grays tossed and teetered even in their speed, and the chariot dropped back a pace. Ahead, Essandar’s bays were slowing slightly too. Yet the blacks gained. I heard Darak singing love words to them over the gush and crackle of the flames.

Frightened droppings slid from the nervous grays in front. Barl glanced over his shoulder swiftly. He saw how it would be. We would have him cheek to jowl, the Sogothan, the Neronian too, perhaps, in a huddle beside us. In a frantic decision his long lash curled out over the grays, drawing blood. Startled out of terror, they leaped forward, to join Essandar in an impossible burst of speed. Through the blazing net of sparks the blue and yellow tore, emerging neck and neck. Barl had snatched his speed. He could not keep it.

Into the black smoke. In the cover of it, inches from the pillars, the Sogothan came beside us. The archer, grinning, fired at Darak, breaking one of the few laws of the Sagare. I deflected the arrow, took a second in my left arm. This was the boy with the pearls. First flames licked at us. He was clinging now to the rattling chariot. Stench of tar, of smoldering horse-hair. I ignored the shaft buried in me. I drew three plain arrows and dipped their flights in the leaping tongues. Not scarlet flights now but yellow. The Sogothan had veered away to take the other side beyond the middle pillar. They emerged first, ahead of us, and I aimed all three burning shafts after them. Luck. One fell short. The other two struck home in the axle—that wooden axle which caught so beautifully. Now it was blazing. Under the Sogothan’s bare feet the metal floor plates snapped open and flames licked through. Along the shafts it went, caught reins and harness. So quick; now they too wore the scarlet of the vine. I did not look at them again, but broke the arrow shaft, leaving only the head in my arm. Not so bad. I put it from my mind.

We were around the turn, nearing the Warden’s gallery. The first lap was over.

I looked up at the Skora. Three markers were gone now, gray, green, and black; and of the blue, yellow, purple, white, and scarlet flights one lap gone also.

We had set the pattern for the race, we five. Bellan had said this would be so. Essandar the leader, Barl on his neck, not for long, but with a skillful archer who kept Essandar’s disdainful youth at a distance.

Darak third, the unpredictable third of any race—the one who may leap on to win, or drop back to nothing. Just behind us, Neron, gaining on us, and then Soils, who seemed to have no race at all left, and to be running just for the exercise. In this formation, then, we took the second and third laps. They are the dead laps of the race, and often the fourth, too. It is the first, the fifth, and the sixth generally which are the kingpins of the game.

But the fourth lap brought a fluke of chance that broke the pattern once and for all. They do not remove the chariot wrecks from the stadium, only the men, or what is left of them. Thus the wrecks become yet further obstacles. Lascallum had fallen at the third gate of the Pillars of Earth, blocking it; there were now only three openings instead of four, and theoretically only two, because the fourth and farthest out gave such a loss of speed that every chariot that could avoided it. Andum and Coppain were still together, nearing the first and second openings when a stray metal plate from the wreck jolted the blue, and Andum swerved across it. At the same instant the yellow archer got a corded flight into Essandar’s wheel. Essandar, a master of his team, pulled them back and held them, and the chariot kept upright while the blue archer slashed the foul from the spokes with the tiny knife allowed in the arena. But it was a pause. Andum was through the Skora gate and ahead, and Essandar, starting up again, found we had joined him, Neron at back.

Darak, at this stage, would have given Essandar the first opening, but Essandar stared back at us, and there was a look in his face, not for us but for Bellan. He would shame the broken charioteer further if his trained pupils fell. So he swung back, ignoring the advantageous first opening, and headed straight toward the second, where we, with Neron a fraction after us, were headed. Darak hauled on the reins; the blacks, unused to this roughness and unable to check, leaped upward in the air. The car went with them, up, and then down, crashing hard on the Straight. I thought I had broken my back against the bar, and all the chariot was broken with me, but somehow we were whole, flung to the side by our own impetus, yet upright. Essandar was through the gate, but Neron, striving to avoid both of us, had gone at full reach into the Lascallum wreck. It was a double tangle of metal, the grays kicking feebly in death throes, both charioteer and archer flung out onto the sand, the driver dead, the boy shrilly screaming in agony. As Darak righted us, I fired a shaft into his brain—no more could be done for him.

Through the Skora opening now, and fast, unevenly fast, for our impetus had been smashed. Yet we were one of the few to be stopped still in the Sirkunix, and live. The crowd, which had yelled its fascinated horror at our leap, now roared and bawled for us.

Soils behind us. Ahead—greatly ahead—Essandar, and before him, Barl, running too fast to cling to his lead. Already he was slowing. Through the water, by the pits of air, between the flames—and it was the flames that ended him. His team hated the fire. Each time they passed they hated it the more, and now, his lash merciless over them, they ran mad, careened around, and bolted back the way they had come. I saw Essandar’s whip rear out and slash them as they passed him—the crowd saw too, and growled. We were at the Pillars of Air when that fire-crazy team ran at us.

Darak pulled aside, the screaming horses fled past, their eyes rolling, and then the wheel tipped back from under us. We had caught in the pit, would be over in a moment. I leaped forward beside Darak, throwing the little weight I had off the sinking wheel, and in the same instant Darak’s lash—for the first and last time—flared on the black satin backs. Again they leaped forward, almost as if in flight. The wheel ground free and we were out. I glimpsed Darak’s face in that second—white, but whiter than that white, the teeth grinning. The crowd was howling for us, and behind, the Andumite team had slowed trembling in the middle of the Straight, facing the wrong way, and grooms had run out to hasten them from the track.

Only Essandar now; Soils was not in it. And the blacks had their speed again, that second speed that a charioteer can love out of his team in the white bloody dust. Through the fire, past the still burning wreck of Sogotha, and around, across the String, and our four scarlet arrows taken down, along with Essandar’s blue. Two more laps. He was half a length ahead but he would not keep it. The dust, which slows every wheel, would slow his too, and we had time to take him.

We took him—Earth, Water, and Air, and we were near. At the turn, the fire ahead, we were one and one, the blue and the scarlet.

The fires dim near the end of the Sagare as the tar is burned out. But there is a lot of smoke, more than ever, thick and black as a cloak. Under that cloak, as Sogotha would have done, the blue archer tried for us. But eyes water from smoke—his aim was nothing.

And then I heard Essandar—clear, so clear: “Do as the bitch did—dip your arrow, boy, and hit one of the horses.”

The archer laughed. It would be easy. The fire would burn straight down the shaft into the black hide, leaving no trace, only the flames. Had Darak heard? He seemed not to have done.

So fast now, and so dark. The speed incredible, everything a blur. But I ripped the shield off my arm, half my skin coming with it, and as I saw that bright orange dart go over us, I flung the shield and brought it and the arrow down, harmless, and in their path.

The shield jounced and broke under the horses’ hooves, and slowed them as they avoided the Sogothan wreck. Now, on that fifth lap, we were ahead.

We broke from the smoke first, and the terraces pounded their hands and yelled. I saw the red flags waving—many more than at the start. Around, and near the String, wholly stretched now. But we must not go past that fire with them again.

Bellan, where do you sit? With your master Raspar, who is near the Warden? Give me your hate, Bellan. And I will do it. I must not hit the man, the horses, the archer—that is the law of the Sagare, though who would guess it? But the chariot, and the things of the chariot, are all mine.

Amusing—I noted dimly the Soilish car was so far behind, it was in front of us on the Straight.

I turned, and stared backward, leaning on the bar, the plain-flighted arrow already set.

One hope only. I am more than you. Bellan, watch—! I shot. The arrow ran up, silver against blue, dipped over, fell. I guided it more with the eyes than with the hands which had loosed it.

And it struck.

It struck.

A scream, a roar from the terraces, men and women leaping to their feet, howling their savage joy, for I had it—the classic shot of the Sagare—I had sliced Essandar’s reins in two.

It is possible for a man to save himself when his reins snap, but not easy, and now impossible. He was moving too fast, leaning out across his team. The thrust, which had held him steady, now, pulled him forward. The one rein still wrapped around his fist dragged him up, over the boss, across the backs of his team, a tumbling, blue, shrieking thing, held a moment between the running horses, then down beneath their hooves, and after that, beneath the wheels of his own chariot.

The bays ran a while, then stopped, shivering, until the grooms came for them.

We rode that last sixth lap alone, fast for the joy of it, not because we must, and the crowd sang for us as we ran.

If there are gods of the Sagare, how they must laugh. Darros of Sigko, scarlet for Ankurum, the Victor.

And his second, Gillan of Soils—second because there was no other left to ride for it.

9

MORTAL, NOW YOU ARE GOD

It is hard at first to believe you are not, after you are named Victor. They will not let you remember your clay. Naturally, it is the charioteer who is king, but I had leveled with Darak in my own way—with that last shot.

“Trust the bitch to undermine me,” Darak remarked, grinning, to Maggur, when at last we were free of the cheers, ovations, thrusting crowds, golden wreaths, and had come away with our prize money. Much had happened since the end of the race, but it was cloudy and unreal. Now Darak was taking me to one of the physicians’ rooms—taking, for I did not want to go. I imagined there might be others there—the remains of them, groaning and shrieking, but in fact it was very private. We were, after all, the Victors.

One empty clean room, and one physician. He peered at my left arm. The skin was already almost closed around the broken-off shaft, but the head was in deep. He frowned over the fast healing wound, and sterilized his knife. Strange, I had scarcely been a woman in that race, and had not felt the pain. I sat and held my arm for him quite thoughtlessly, and the moment the knife slit open my flesh the agony struck through my whole body like a white-hot spear.

I opened my eyes again, and found he was done with me, having bandaged both left arm and right, where I had ripped the skin tearing off my shield. Darak and Maggur were gone.

“I sent them out,” the physician said sternly. “They made more fuss than you, young woman. When it was bad, you, at least, had the good sense to faint and save me the trouble of holding you down.” He was straightening his things and washing his hands. “There’s your arrowhead. You could sell it for ten silver pieces. And your hair, an inch or so would fetch a good price. The classic shot.” He grunted and did not look very approving. I suppose he had worse cases than I as a result of Ankurum’s Games.

When he was gone, I lay still, in a kind of torpor, heavy, not sleepy, melancholy after the passion and fear. After a while I unclipped the left armlet, which was bothering me, and the little dry vine leaf fell onto the couch. I picked it up and at once it crumbled in my fingers. I had prayed to her in the manner of men, and she—had she heard? Was it she who had granted us the race, and granted me Barak’s life? Yet I had killed Essandar. I had known he would die. What did she think of me now, that little doll-goddess in the hills?

I got up, wondering where Darak had gone, anxious to shake off the fastening depression that had fallen on me in the aftermath.

I pulled aside the curtain and went out into the corridor beyond. There was no one there. Everything was very quiet. I was suddenly, irrationally afraid. I did not even recall the way we had come. Then footsteps.

I tensed. Around the left hand corner came a limping shadow, over its shoulder a fall of dark cloth.

“Here,” Bellan said, “take this cloak and put it on. I rejoice you’re not ashamed of your body, but it causes some interest too much,”

I took the cloak and wrapped myself in it. His face was dry and closed and very weary; he seemed to bear the look I felt beneath the shireen.

“A good race. And you won your shot. I knew you would. The practice track is one thing, the Straight another.”

“Bellan,” I said softly, “I am sorry I took your man. He was not mine to take.”

Bellan shrugged awkwardly, for the shrug comes from the arms, and the hands too.

“I was glad to see him go—like that. Not even dead, I hear, but not much left. Even less—” He broke off. “For two years I have lived to see that man served as I was served by him, lived for it, lived because of it. And now”—he shook his head—“it’s done.”

He began to walk, and I followed him.

“The streets are packed,” he said. “We’ll get out as swift and quiet as we can. I sent your Darros on ahead. You’ll have enough of the mob tonight—the Warden’s feast for the Victors of the Games.”

We went to Raspar’s town house, which was small, and not even particularly elegant. I bathed, and lay quiet while the giant woman from the villa beat the bruises out of me. Then I slept. Waking, it was sunset, the brassy red splashed all across the white walls. I had not seen Darak since the physician had cut into my arm, and I did not see him now. Three strange women came and told me they would dress me for the Victor’s feast. I felt so tired and dull and empty, and it seemed as if I were going backward in time to the evening of the agent’s supper, which had begun it all.

I must robe as a woman, it appeared, but in the chariot’s colors. They had three dresses ready and wanted me in scarlet silk, but I took instead the black velvet—a new fashion, and beautifully draped.

Besides, its long close sleeves would hide my bandages. They dressed my hair, curled and plaited it, and strung it through with bright red beads like drops of blood. The shireen they had brought was incredible—black silk, embroidered around the eyes with scarlet thread. They had been even quicker than those others with the white dress.

I sat for a while after they had gone, then left the room and went down the narrow stairs to the round hall. It was empty, except for Raspar, pouring himself a little wine at the porphyry table. He paused and bowed to me.

“Good evening. Pardon me, I have not yet congratulated you on the race. I hope the arrow wound is not bad?”

“Thank you, no.”

“That’s good. Essandar is dead; did they tell you?”

I said nothing. He, said, “Has Bellan informed you about the feast? Ah, well, you and Darros will ride in your chariot through the streets to the Warden’s mansion, lit by torches. There you will eat and drink, and receive various quite superfluous honors, in company with the other victors, and show yourselves from time to time on the large balcony. The Warden’s garden will be open to the people, and there will be free wine and meat. It will be noisy and probably tiresome. But there—” He came toward me, lifted my hand and kissed it as he had that first night. “Hard to believe this is the harlot-boy of the chariot—oh, forgive me, but how else can I express it? I know you are Darros’ property, so I’ll not press any flatteries on you. Besides, what would I do with a woman like you in my household?”

“I am not Darros’ property,” I said, “nor he mine.”

“As well,” Raspar said, “he has been with a lady since the race ended. Still, bad of me to try to tempt you that way. You must know him by now. The white bird calls, and he flies into her tree. But you are the nest, tribal princess. I think you know it.”

His words seemed to make little sense. I was restless and uneasy. I crossed the room to one of its windows, and stared out, over the winding streets and leaning roofs, to the twilight.

At that moment Darak came into the house, Darak, Ellak, Maggur, Gleer, and a half dozen others. He was very bold now with his host, having won his race for him. I turned and looked at Darak. He, too, wore the chariot colors—scarlet, black, and gold. He looked a god still; he was not drained or staled.

He strode to me at once.

“Did that sour-faced knife-monger get the arrowhead out?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you want to know what I’ve been at?”

“Perhaps not.”

“Well, then, with some silly bitch, but profitably so. Her husband has his racers, too, it seems, and there are other Games to come, in Soils and Lascallum. How do you like me as a charioteer?”

Was this some madness on him? Did he not recall what he was? And his men behind him, listening, hearing this threat of desertion—I glanced at them, but they grinned like stupid dogs. Perhaps this was some new game. His long black hair was a little shorter than I remembered. He sensed my eyes.

“They’ll buy it,” he said. “Oh, but it wasn’t sold. A woman sent begging for a piece of it.”

He took my hand, turned and saluted Raspar for the first time—yet it was the salute of the chariots.

“The torchbearers are at your gates, and the grooms have the chariot out.”

Raspar raised the cup, and watched us go with slightly narrowed eyes, out into the falling night.

Ten torchbearers, their brands flaring dull gold, the chariot, drawn no longer by Raspar’s blacks, but by three ebony plodders dressed up to look the same, and escorting black horses for Darak’s men.

“Tonight,” he said to me, “I’ll get Ellak’s brawling fools from the Warden’s dungeons—as a Victor’s boon.”

We were in the chariot, but it no longer had the feel of life to it. Its soul was gone, or asleep. Slowly we wound down the streets to other broader streets, and there linked with other torches and colored lanterns, and the procession of Victors on their mounts. In this glimmering, limping way, we coiled like a serpent, upward toward the fortress-house of the Warden.

More and more people, milling into the open squares before the mansion, and into the gardens at its back.

The laughter and shouts went through my body and brain like knives. I heard them roar for Darak, and the cries, “The tribal-woman!”

It was empty. No longer was I a god in that place.

There were ten pillars at the Warden’s portico, and ten more inside, all marble, gilded at the capitals and bases, and inlaid with blue mosaic. There was a great sense of bright light, smoke, movement, and twanging music from little harps. We reached an upper-story room, enormous, running the length of the whole mansion, open at two ends, where massive pillared balconies leaned out, one over the squares, the other over the gardens. The room was golden—all gold. There were frescoes and paintings on floor and ceiling, but I do not remember them; their figures seemed all mixed in with the people in the room.

Beyond the balcony hung the dark blue night, split occasionally by pale blue lightning, and below, a sea of colored lamps, torches, and roasting fires.

There are many victors in the Games at Ankurum; boxers, acrobats, fighters, but the places at the high table, where the Warden sits, go to the winners of the horse races, the chariot races, and the Sagare. The plates are enamel and gold, the cups black jasper set with semiprecious stones. What you eat off is yours to keep, and women in transparent gauze come by from time to time and lay little trinkets at your elbow—gold knives and pins—all useless toys, but pretty enough.

Darak was seated at the Warden’s right hand—the place of highest honor. By his side was a beautiful woman with pure golden hair that seemed natural though one could not be sure of such things in Ankurum. On the Warden’s left sat Gillan of Soils in his white, grinning to himself now and again, possibly at the irony of his position. I, as the archer who had taken the classic shot, sat beside Gillan, and Gillan was very wary of me, overgracious in a bluff, rough way, and silent for the rest of the while. Other charioteers and racers, and I suppose Gillan’s archer, ranged down the table, interspersed with the beauties of the Warden’s court. I do not remember any of them. To be courteous and appear to eat, while eating as little as possible, was preoccupation enough. I felt ill throughout the courses and was uncertain of the reason. The hall seemed burning and miasmic.

We sat along one side of the table only, and below us the other tables stretched out, noisier and less formal than ours. Barak’s men, the few he had brought with him, were in among that throng, guzzling and gnawing. I hoped vaguely there would be no trouble, for the Warden’s guard, as was usual enough at such a function, were arranged thickly around the walls, particularly at the Warden’s back. I watched his fleshy ringed hands neatly skewering his food. The pains began in my stomach.

I must leave this place. The thought came sudden and ice cold. At once I saw the room as though it had been frozen, paler, almost transparent. I forgot the dictates of etiquette. I was about to get up and say—I was not certain, perhaps I would simply run down among the tables to the door. But the Warden’s jeweled hand went up, a lordly flick, a horn sounded, and he rose. Comparative silence fell. He was about to toast the Victors. Impaled by the moment, I sat still and did not move. A sea of faces, nodding a little, touched gold by light, smiling, laughing, harmonious. The Warden lifting his silver cup again and again as the Speaker cried out the Victors’ names and towns, and the horn echoed him, and the shouts and cheers. And then the trained voice with its slight overemphasis, “Victor of the Sagare: Darros of Sigko.”

The great roar and clapping, the Warden bending smiling toward Darak. And then that fleshy hand, waving the sound gently down.

Still standing, the Warden lowered his cup to the table.

“Darros of Sigko,” he repeated, his rich voice carrying. “We know him well, do we not? The courageous merchant who brought his caravan safe to Ankurum, a feat unparalled—and then rode to win the empress of our races, the Sagare.” Cheers beat up like birds, and gently again he waved them down.

Smiling still, he leaned out toward the tables now. “And one more thing our Darros had done. He has deceived us all.” The silence grew closer. The Warden laughed a little. “The Victor of our Sagare is, in fact, nothing more than a thief, a murderer, and a bandit—Darak, the gold-fisher, the scum of the northern hills.” He turned to Darak and nodded. “Your little game is over, charioteer.”

The guards started forward from the walls behind us, ten men straight toward Darak. There was uproar below now, and some women were screaming. We had brought no weapons into the hall with us; it was not etiquette to do so. I could not seem to move. I saw Darak standing, leaning back against the table, grinning at the ten who had come to take him. I am not sure how I saw, for Gillan and the Warden were between us. I saw Darak’s hand reach back onto the table and pick up one of those toy golden knives they had given us—useless, it would bend, not bite—yet one of the guard saw that movement. The iron guard-sword licked out and forward. I heard Darak gasp. His hands fell to his sides. He looked at the man, almost lazily, his mouth still curved, not knowing quite yet that he was dead. Two guards caught him between them as he fell, hoisted him, and began to carry him out. They had been very quick, no blood even spilled on this golden table. Two of them had my arms, had had them, I realized now, since the Warden first spoke his accusation. They were pulling me up and away with them. I think they had put something in my cup, in Darak’s too; my legs were like heavy iron as they dragged me. And Darak’s men had been so quickly subdued in the body of the hall. Yet they had not kept it so tidy there. Ellak and another man lay dead. One guard was dying, several bloody. Women’s white faces stared at us as we passed, like a funeral procession, following Darak’s corpse.

His head hung back, the face very still, his mouth firmly closed, solemn now in death. His scarlet cloak trailed behind him.

Scarlet for the vine. Little doll-goddess, you took your offering after all, then—death for death, little goddess of the scarlet vine.

10

“Karrakaz!” I screamed down the black places of the mountain. “Karrakaz, et So! Et So-Sestorra!”

A hand clamped my mouth. I was shaken from one dark to another. Maggur’s eyes, red-shot in the gloom.

“Ssh, Imma, who do you call out to?”

Strange, he did not know the old tongue, yet he seemed to know what I had said. I lay quiet on the rank filthy straw of the prison room.

“What time is it, Maggur? How long now?”

He shook his head. “Sun looks low from the grating. Near sunset.”

There were other men in the stone chamber—all they had caught from the hostelry. Those that had been brought here before the feast of Victors, after their brothel brawl, we neither saw nor had any word of.

We had been here two days now, and to begin with they had laughed and jibed at the guard outside, throwing out bones at them from the door hole. They had told stories: “Yes, Slak’s lot got away, took a few pieces of these pigs’ hide with ’em, too.” Now their spirit was burned out in the dank black hole, stinking with their own excrement and fear. We were all to be hanged—publicly. And we were to go to it three a day. You were not sure when they would come for you, or who they would pick. The first time the three had gone with a salute and a swagger. Men climbed up to the grating high in the wall and saw them dangle in the square. The second time it was less bold, that going out. That second day, too, there had been a fourth man strung up. They had hung Barak’s dead body with the rest.

How the crowds had roared at it, in the square, loud as they had roared in the Sirkunix. Louder. Life loves to look on death.

A man at the window—I cannot remember who—spat out of the grating.

“On you, you sty of a stinking town.”

Yet I had not been dreaming of Darak, but of the Mountain, and I had run toward the altar crying, “Here am I! Here am I! The Accursed One!”

I sat up. My hair was tangled with the straw, and the red beads still hung in it.

“How long, Maggur?” I whispered. “Will they leave me until last, Maggur, because I took the classic shot?”

But it would come. The reins around my throat, the running horses. I would hear the crowd yell as they broke my neck.

Maggur put his great arm around me, and I leaned on him in the darkness.

The next day, the footsteps came at noon.

Door rasping, spill of ocher torchlight from the night-dark passages outside. Six guards, with drawn swords, and two jailers.

“Out. You, you, and the black one.”

Two of the men rose—one of them was Gleer. Maggur got up more slowly, his hand lingering on my arm. Gleer began to whistle, a brothel song; the other man made a little lunge at the guard that brought all their swords up in a knot, and laughed at them.

“Come on, you, the black one. You won’t be losing your girlfriend yet awhile, she’s coming too.”

I took Maggur’s hand and let him draw me up. The four of us walked toward the door. I do not think I was afraid. There must be substance to breed fear, and I was hollow. The door clanged shut behind, and we were herded through the pitch-black tunnels of that foul warren, guided by the jailers’ murky brands.

After a time there were stairs, and at the top a corridor stretching to left and right. Two of the guard suddenly swung me aside from the rest, pulling me right while Maggur and the others were marched left.

Maggur halted at once, ignoring the prodding swords, the cuffs and curses. He was a giant of a man.

Here, in this narrow place, he could throw two or three of them off his back like a wild dog, shake them and throw them, until they had hacked him to pieces. I shook my head at him. I knew what he thought, what I thought too, that I was to pleasure some of the guards before they took me out. It was nothing.

Only one more thing to accomplish before death. He seemed to sense my lack of concern. He let them turn him around, and was led away, into the darkness behind the worm-tail of receding torchlight.

We had not far to go. There was a big wooden door, studded with metal. The guards rapped on it, a voice barked inside, and they opened it and thrust me through. The door shut, the guards on the other side of it. I was in a square stone room, not lit by brands but three oval lamps. Skins hung on the walls, and swords and shields. There was an oak table, and facing me across it, from his huge wooden chair, a big man dressed as an officer. He looked impatient, callous, disinterested. The iron armlets shone dully on his wrists. It did not seem he had any use for the woman in me. He picked up a roll of rough reed paper and tossed it across the table toward me.

“Can you read?”

“Yes,” I said.

I picked up the roll, and read. My eyes were blurred and would not focus properly, and the light hurt them. I could not seem to concentrate on the ornately written words; the curlicues uncoiled and snapped back again like snakes in pain.

“I do not understand,” I said at last.

“I thought you said you could read. I reckoned that was a wild boast for a snot-nosed bandit mare.

Well. You’re to go free of here. By order of the Warden. To the protection of some stinking tribal savage who says you’re of his krarl.”

“Who?” I asked. “None knows my krarl.”

“Who cares, girl? Not I.”

He gave another bark and the door opened again. A guard stood there, and with him a lean brown figure, naked to the waist. The hair, caught back in its club, took pale color from the lamps. On the breast was the tattoo of a moon circle, and, within it, a five-pointed star.

The officer looked him up and down, and then, with a contemptuous grunt, picked up the roll and threw it to him. Asutoo caught it.

“Out,” the officer said.

I went toward Asutoo very slowly. His face was difficult to see in the doorway where shadows clustered. He did not touch me, only nodded, and I walked in front of him, behind the guard, toward the prison’s door, so strangely open for me.

It was a dark noon, and the rain fell heavily. I must have heard it through the grating of the cell, but I suppose it had meant nothing to me then. Three of the bronzy plains horses were tethered to a post by the low doorway from which we had emerged. A guard on duty huddled in his cloak. We were in the back alleys of Ankurum, hovels and stench, worse, much worse, in the gray rain. Asutoo gave me a black cloak and indicated I should put it on, and mount the nearest horse. When this was done, he himself mounted. He rode a little ahead of me, leading the third horse, which bore a pack on its back.

I think I had no thoughts or even any wonder in me as we rode through the gray rain and the hovels of Ankurum.

Very few people were about. A scattering of curious stares at the tribal man and his woman, that was all. Eventually there was a wall and a gate, and, riding out of it, we were among the hills, a wild part, growing tall trees. Into these trees we went, and a small river ran by, frothing in the rain, over gray stones.

I reined in my horse and stared down, and saw Kel’s arrow go floating along the water after I had snapped the shaft. They would have hanged Maggur already. His neck so strong—would the cord break it? Or would his be the slow choking death...?

Asutoo had stopped a little way ahead. I looked at him and he spoke to me for the first time.

“Do you need to rest here, my brother? There is a place farther up—a cave ledge that will shelter us from the sky’s weeping.”

“Asutoo,” I said, “why am I free?”

“I asked for you,” he said.

“Your word would be dust to them,” I said, realizing dimly that we spoke in the tribal tongue.

“The merchant-lord, Raspar,” he said. “I begged your life from him.”

A flickering light moved behind my eyes, in my brain.

“Asutoo, my brother, why do we ride here, and not back to the krarl of the Star?”

He stared at me across the rain, his blue eyes very wide, water drops caught on the lashes. I rode forward a little way, until I was near to him, near enough to touch.

“Asutoo, my brother, why do we not ride to your chiefs krarl?”

“I am an Outcast,” he said.

“Why, Asutoo?”

“My brother, it is between me and my chief.” He glanced away abruptly, indicating the pack horse. “I have your man’s clothes there and your knives and bow. Do not fear dishonor to be with me. Many warriors will join my spear. What I have done is between my chief’s law and my own.”

“Asutoo,” I said, “forgive my doubts. You are my brother, and I will ride with you to the cave. I am very tired.”

So we rode, up the hillside through the trees.

Long, but not low or dark, the cave stretched to its own mossy backbone. Asutoo had built a fire a little way in from the entrance, and crouched there, feeding the orange tongues, while I shed the filthy black velvet, and drew on the clothes I had worn as a bandit woman. There was a difference—the shirt was black, not multicolored, and Asutoo had not brought me any of my jewelry, not the gold rings or beads, or even the precious jades. But he had brought my knives and bow, and that one long-knife I had had from the caravan. I drew it from its crimson velvet sheath, and turned the blade so that the silver leopard leaped in the firelight.

“This is good, Asutoo,” I said. I sat across the fire from him and he would not meet my gaze. He looked instead at the silver leopard as I turned it, glittering, on the blade. The white light flicked and dimmed, flicked and dimmed. After a while I said softly, “Asutoo,” and he glanced up, almost sleepily, into my eyes, and I held him. “Now tell me, Asutoo my brother, why you are Outcast?”

It was strange. His face was peaceful and expressionless, but his look was full of a fixed terror. He could not get out of my grip. My eyes were white serpents, already numbing him with their poison.

“I have betrayed the hearth-guest of my chief. I have eaten the bread of friendship with him, but still given him into the hands of his enemies. The krarl priests will set me a penance for it, but they will understand the need.”

“What need, Asutoo, my brother?”

“No man may take a warrior-woman and use her as a woman unless she allows it. Darak took her without honor, and she went gladly. He would have drained her warrior blood and shown her no courtesy. I, Asutoo, the chiefs son, would have let her ride before me to the battle, not dragged her by the reins of the horse. And he put her into a woman’s dress, like any girl of the tents, the white dress—even the one who rode in his chariot. He made of her the shield, that was the spear. It must not be, I walked after in the shadows, and the silver one passed in the sky, the Star chariot. It was my sign.”

“What then did you do, Asutoo, my brother?”

“I found the merchant Raspar before the Great Race of archers. It was hard, but I made him know who Darak was, and he remembered no other had brought a caravan safe to Ankurum. They had some of Darak’s men in the Warden’s dungeon, and took two and burned them with fire until they told the truth.

Raspar said the race must pass first; they could take Darak at the feast, unarmed. I asked the warrior woman be spared. He said at first it could not be done, but afterward he sent me word it could, and there was writing from the Warden—”

He stopped speaking, staring into my eyes.

I was cold, so cold, but I smiled at him, although he could not see it behind the shireen. Within the icy shell a scarlet bird tapped its beak to be free. Raspar would have kept me for himself, perhaps, had I wanted to stay with him, but Raspar had wanted his good name most of all. Well, he had recovered the price of the weapons of the north.

I stood up. Asutoo stood up. We faced each other quite still and quiet, as I turned the blade in my hand.

“Asutoo, my brother,” I said at last, “it is fitting I should give you my thanks.”

The shell burst, and it filled me, flowing warm and bright from my guts into my lungs, heart, and brain; and from my brain into my arm, my hand, my knife. I stabbed forward, and down into the groin, twisted and withdrew. I, who remembered how to kill cleanly, had taken the privilege of my kind, and forgotten it. He bowed forward, groaning over the agony, trying to hold the blood inside himself with his hands. I leaned against the wall and watched him die. It took a little while.

Then I turned and went from the cave, down the slope, and found the hobbled horses gnawing at the rain-wet grass. The downpour had eased. I wiped my knife on the moss and resheathed it. I mounted, and, with the slightest pressure of my knees, I directed the horse upward, toward the mountains.

Near the crest of that place, I turned suddenly, and looked back at the dark mouth of the cave, and it seemed there was a waterfall plunging down from it, not white, but red. The scarlet bird in me was beating now to be free. It burst from my mouth in long bloody streamers of sound, and the horse, terrified, bolted under me, upward, upward, until it seemed we had left the ground, and flew in the face of the bright red sky.