The Birthgrave

1

There had been blackness, and in the blackness: nothing. Now, still closed in the dark, I began to hear a single sound, rhythmically repetitive, a tireless engine lifting, sinking, indrawing, expelling. Quite suddenly I had begun to breathe again.

My eyes opened a little on a cool, dim, greenish light. I thought it was the Jade, and was too weak to reach and touch it. I did not know where I was, or remember what had happened. Again, I lay under a mountain, awaiting birth; the sequences had become mixed and inseparable.

Yet the light was not green at all, clearing now, whitening. A little thud, and dust drifts dancing. I heard shouts and then a rattle of stone stuff coming down. Dust clouded gray, cleared, and showed a great gap ahead of me, full of the whitish light, except where it was full of the silhouette of a man, leaning forward to me, faceless. He gave a muffled exclamation, but the tongue was new to me, and it made no sense at this moment. A hand came groping toward my face, fastened on the silver mask.

“Do not,” I said.

I used the City speech, could recollect nothing else to use. He did not understand, but his hand snatched back from me, and he cried out in surprise. He had thought me dead, no doubt.

He turned and wriggled from the hole they had made, and shouted to others. After a moment strong hands had a hold on my ankles and calves, and I was pulled unceremoniously out of my grave into the harsh searing brilliance of day. I had enough strength to get one arm up to shield my blinded watering eyes, and, in this position, I lay for their inspection, my stained and ripped mantle of yellow Eshkorek velvet rucked up about my thighs, and under that the filthy streamers which had once been fine silken undergarments.

After a while, one of them laughed—I did not particularly blame him—and observed something to the others. This time I seemed able to grasp—not what he said, but the tongue he used. It was new to me, quite new, and yet a far-off echo sounded, something I recognized. ... I lifted my arm a fraction, and stared up at three men. They wore wool leggings of dull reds and yellows, and leather belts and boots.

To the waist they went naked except for armless leather jackets, and their brown, hard bodies were vivid with tattoos of many colors, and scars of many shapes. Tribesmen, speaking a language different from, yet with a tenuous kinship to, the tongue of the Plains. Against the assault of the blazing sky, I struggled to see faces, lean and set, long grim mouths, wide spaced eyes a salty blue. Their hair, more than blond, was reddish, and not bound in clubs or cut short, but woven into five or more thick plaits behind the ears, held out of the eyes by a circular strip of painted cloth stretched around the head.

I was very confused still, but this new awakening was beginning to make sense. I lolled my head a little, and made out other, similarly adorned males, going to and fro among the wreckage of the fallen tower.

Looters, not rescuers. What had I expected? And if they had come so far in order to glory in this collapse of a piece of City power, they would have no time for a woman of that City, half-dead and apparently worth nothing. They would strip my rings and the silver mask, for these were all part of the tower pickings, and then they would ride off and leave me to my fate, or else, perhaps, run a spear through me to help me to it. Unless, of course, they had a fancy for a high-born slave.

They were talking again, and I forced myself to hear what they said. This time the pattern came clear and strong, and I found I could speak it at last. They were discussing their holy man, or seer, who had apparently foretold the fall of Tower Eshkorek, and insisted they ride to it, declaring they would find something precious here. Precious? What other secrets had there been, then? I had no time for speculation. I took the cue luck had given me. They respected religion and magic, it seemed, and dimly I remembered now that Mazlek had mentioned their continual wars.

“I am the precious thing your seer spoke of,” I broke in, and their faces dipped to me, startled. “I am a magicianess of great power, a healer and prophetess. I will help you in your battles, intercede for you with your gods.”

It was a ridiculous announcement for a woman lying on her back, her hair matted with dust and filth, and her torn skirts around her waist. Yet they took it from me, with the naivete of savage men to whom all things are simple, or else extraordinary and great. And I had used their language. How could I know it if I were not what I said?

“Of Eshkir,” one said, using the tribal name for Eshkorek Arnor.

“No,” I said. “And what I am, or where I came from, is of no concern to you. Your wise man told you.

Is that not enough?”

The third of them, who had said nothing all this time, leaned forward abruptly and picked me up. He was strong and it seemed easy for him. He did not carry me elegantly across his body, as a City man would have done, but over his shoulder, like a kill, and I thought of the wagon people.

I could see now that the tower, in falling, had filled up one side of the moat, making a bridge for them to cross by.

Things grew blurred, and somehow rather amusing. I was put facedown over a shaggy brown horse, which liked this state of affairs as little as I, and shifted discontentedly, so that my nose was banged with an infuriating rhythm against the rough horse blanket on its back. As I lay like this, their seeress, as untidily placed as before, the tribal men gathered themselves together, and presumably discussed matters.

After a while of discomfort, dull heat, and nose-banging, my champion mounted himself behind me, and, with some jerks and bumps, we set off. My mind was closed to everything except the humor and indignity of my situation, and I laughed.

And so that is the way I left Tower-Eshkorek, head down over a horse, laughing.

I recollect little of the journey, only waking occasionally to catch glimpses, from the tail of my eye, of a round bluish moon. It seems they made no halt when night came on; they knew their road from the mountains very well. From time to time snatches of their brief conversations sounded through my dozing, but again I could not seem to understand. That did not trouble me much at the time. There were dreams, too, about the things that were past, though it was not for some days that I remembered how the tower had fallen in a close cradle over our heads, a trap, but one which held the rest of the rubble away from us. There was no air in that place, and gradually the murky soporific of death crept in. Asren had not been afraid, and of that I was very glad. He lay in my arms quietly, and long after he was dead, I held him as I waited. I had not thought anyone would ever come to bring me new air so I could breathe again, and had not greatly cared. Yet these warriors, sent by their seer, had opened a way.

It was a long journey for them to come. I reckoned later it took three days or more for the return.

There was a halt or two. Once I was offered food, but I did not want it, and could not have eaten it, in any case, without raising the lynx mask.

How long had I lain under the tower? They would not have come immediately—not until the soldiers had gone. At one point I thought of the child, wondered if it were dead in the womb, and, if it were not, how it liked my position over the horse. The warriors had had scant respect for a swelling pregnancy. But I had not thought of it before.

Fourth day? Morning changing the sky as I cricked my neck trying to see it. A great deal of jolting, and I realized that we were working a way down from the mountain slopes; just a glimpse of their sun-painted terraces behind me. I was too fully conscious now to bear my comfortless position.

“Let me up,” I called, and the warrior whose horse carried me grunted. It occurred to me I had spoken in the City tongue. I corrected myself clumsily, struggling with the new words. “Let me move—let me ride with you.”

The man laughed nastily. I became aware no mere woman would be allowed to sit a horse, let alone a horse with a warrior already on it.

“Then let me down,” I said. “I will walk.”

He consulted his neighbors, a taciturn dialogue. After a moment we halted and I was pulled off. One of them tied a rope around my waist, and attached it to “my” warrior’s saddle horn.

“This is not needed,” I said. “I shall not run away. I come freely to your tribe to be seeress and healer.”

Their faces were blank, and I broke off, conscious of having slipped back again into City speech, and of waving my arms and hands in pointless gesticulation, as I have seen people do when they cannot express themselves properly in an alien language. Abruptly I wondered if I had managed it as well as I judged at the tower; had I imagined their apparent acceptance?

With a jerk at my tether, the horse began to move, and I began to move after, of necessity.

I thought at first it was a lucky place to have chosen, for we were on the last of those slopes, and the way grew easier by the minute. I was glad to be walking, even roped as I was, even though my legs felt weak and occasionally buckled unexpectedly at the knees, and even though court sandals are not made to stumble in over jagged holes and boulders, and I stubbed each toe a thousand times. We were going down into a valley of rocky turbulent shapes, clustered with stands of thorn, thin pines, and other dark slender trees. The valley was full of velour shadows, but the sky overhead was golden-green, still streaked with red fingers of cloud. I was far from happy as I looked at it; how could I be happy? Yet a sort of calm seemed to flow into me, inhaled like a drug of forgetfulness from the cool air.

And then, feeling better ground under them, my escort kicked at their shaggy horses, mine included, and broke into a gallop. I tried to run with them, but I had no hope. The rags of my dress caught my feet, and in an instant the rope snapped taut, and I was pulled down. Dust in my eyes and nostrils, grazed by every stony upthrust, torn by sharp rocks, I was dragged helplessly forward, practically strangled by the cord at my waist. This is what the charioteer goes in fear of, if he has room for fear, one of those deaths the Sagare can offer. My left arm across my breasts in an instinctive protection, I tried to claw the rope free of me with the other. No use. I screamed for them to stop. No use.

Suddenly the way was smoother. More dust. Incongruously I twisted to avoid a heap of goat dung, and was hauled through a broken bush tuft instead. My journey came to an end.

I lay there on my face for a moment, and then crawled to my knees. Around the makeshift track was a scattering of dark blue tents among the tall pines. Ahead, a larger tent, painted yellow on the blue, and before it a big fire-pit, smoking, and only just alight from the labors of four shireen masked women in black sleeveless garments. They had stopped work to stare at me. One of the warriors gave a yell at them and they ran like terrified hens, into the trees and out of sight.

We had come to this place around a jut of rock, which hid it well from the roll of the slopes. They had otherwise no stockade, yet this was a krarl, though not large—about twenty tents in all.

The dust was still settling, the warriors riding circles, our horses still snorting and agitated from the gallop, when two men emerged from the painted tent, one before the other. The first was a very big man, yet with not enough stature for his girth, heavily muscled, and with a hint of fat to come from many jugs of tribal beer. His large blue eyes were pouchy stupid—and yet cunning, too; and in addition to red plaited hair, he wore a full beard, well greased and plaited also. This beard dressing must be an irksome thing to him, and, from the look of it, it was most probably performed not more than three times a year, the last session being long past. He was unmistakably a chieftain, and he swaggered as he came, very sure of his ground. Dressed as his warriors in leather jacket, leggings, and boots, he wore many collars and trinkets over his tattoos, armbands of burnished copper, and there were tassels swaying from his belt. The other, who came behind him was a different thing again. Thin, tall, covered by a long brown robe caught at the waist in a leather thong, his hair unbound and fiery-colored yet streaked with gray, his face shaved like the faces of the warriors but painted black, so that it seemed he, too, went masked. Wild pale eyes rolled around in that black face, which, despite the gray hair looked of indeterminate age. and he clutched at a wooden shape hanging on his chest. Their seer?

Arms went up in salute. The gaudy chieftain nodded and looked at me.

“What is this?” I heard him say through the throbbing of my blood.

“An Eshkir, from the tower, Ettook,” one of them said, and then laughed. “A seeress, she said. The precious thing Seel sent us to find.”

The holy man Seel moved around Ettook the chief, and came toward me. I wanted to get up to face him, but I could not seem to manage it, and, as I kneeled there, I struggled to find words instead.

“I am a magicianess,” I said; but I had used the City tonaue.

Seel came very close, and I smelled the stink of his body, the stench of skin forever wrapped up in a covering, and never exposed to sun or air or water. He seemed angry, his dry hands knotting and unknotting, his sharp yellowish fangs bared in a grin of hatred for me. His eyes glittered and darted.

Suddenly he spat into my masked face. He shrieked some words I could not understand, and broke into a hopping dance. He leaped away from me, and, still screaming, he ran to each warrior in turn, poking at them with bony fingers. The warriors seemed afraid and backed away. I could not properly follow, but it appeared I was not what he had wanted brought; there had been some other thing—and they had missed it.

Again I felt I might begin to laugh, despite the pain I was in. And yet I must deal with them now, these tribal savages, or else I was lost. I made myself think of how they had dragged me those last yards over the ragged ground, of how the seer had spat in my face. Anger came, hot and bright, and filled me like a jar. I got to my feet.

“Old man,” I called out to Seel, deliberately discourteous, and I had the right words now, for he flung around frothing, and glared at me like a filthy old dog, which can still bite. “I told you,” I said, “I am a magicianess.”

I looked at him, and the anger rose behind my eyes, a great throbbing tide. But no light came, no pain of opening, only the pain of a huge thing that could find no way out. I struggled with myself as I stood there, striving to release my Power on Seel, to kill him, and prove myself before these dangerous tormentors.

But I could no longer control or utilize my Power. My anger sagged and lay still. I recalled how I had burned from the brain of Vazkor the nest of ability, how I had sealed the avenues of his thought forever.

In doing that, it seemed. I had drained myself, destroyed myself. Oh, I should have known it sooner; I had been unable to understand their speech as we rode, was still unable to master it fully, and that was a gift I had always had until now, since I woke under the Mountain.

Appalled and terrified, I confronted Seel, totally at a loss. The warriors began to laugh. Ettook began to laugh. Seel, however, did not laugh at all. He came to me and clouted me several ringing blows across my head, until at last the sound became the warning gongs of Belhannor, clamoring because Anash and Eptor were at the gates.

2

The tent where they had put me was very dark, and smelled of women and women’s things, yet I thought at first it was empty except for myself. There were goatskins and rugs on the floor, and I lay among these, stiff and sore and sick. I began cautiously to explore my body, for I was in a cold panic now lest, along with everything else, my self-healing had vanished too. It seemed it had not, for the rents and gashes on my body were sealing themselves, the black bruises fading.

Abruptly I saw the woman’s shape ahead of me. She had been standing very still until this moment, now she moved and came forward. The little drift of light through the tent wall caught her, and showed me a covered face from which large dark eyes stared coldly. Perhaps thirty years old, which in the tribes would be the forty of Ankurum, yet beautiful; this I could tell without even seeing her face. She had a beautiful body also, under the black garment, or would have had, for now it was swollen with far-advanced pregnancy, and the large firm breasts were drooping with their milk. She was dressed basically as the ordinary women of the krarl—those who had run away from the warriors—in a sleeveless black shift and a black shireen. Yet her bare arms were ringed from wrist to shoulder with bracelets of copper, silver, and painted enamel, and around her throat was a collar of nothing less than gold, set with dull blue gems. Earrings holding the same stones rattled from her ears. Her hair was black as the mane of a black horse, and hung around her head and neck and down her back like a curtain.

Clearly she was not of this krarl, and not of the Dark People either, for her skin was creamy, almost white, except for its slight acceptance of the sun.

“I am Tathra,” she said to me, “Ettook’s wife. Ettook’s only wife,” she added, asserting her rights to my respect and fear.

I said nothing, and after a moment she said, “You have been stupid. It is not good to anger Seel. I spoke to Ettook for your life. He listened.”

“Why?” I said.

“You carry,” she said without expression. “A City birth, but it can be weaned to our ways—one more spear for Ettook’s might. Or else, one more to bear sons for him. Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” I said. She had spoken slowly, so I should be able to follow. “And for me?”

“You I will have,” she said.

“Your slave.”

“My slave. A woman of the Cities must know many things, many ways for a wife to please her man.”

Did I catch a flicker of unease in her words? Was she unsure then of the continuance of her husband’s fidelity? I could not find the words to test her.

“Tomorrow dawn,” she told me. “You can come to me then. This day you will lie here, in the tent of Kotta, where the women come when they are sick.”

She turned her magnificent, laden body, and went out. Things were settled. I was to be, after all, the high-born slave I had feared to be as I lay by the tower. Yet it was the best I could hope for. I had no longer any power or status. Who was I to argue with this destiny? At least I had been spared the tortures of Seel. I would be a drudge now, among the tents, and I would kneel before the warriors, and run from them when they shouted at me. I would be a woman, as women were reckoned in this place, a half-souled, witless animal, created to bear and pleasure men; an afterthought of the god.

It was very hot. I dozed from the heat, uncomfortably and without refreshment. Later a woman came, big-framed as a man, with muscular arms, and her hair bound around with a blue scarf. Earrings clanking, she felt my body, and grunted to herself.

“Sound,” she said to me, “for all the rough treatment of the braves. And this”—she prodded lightly at my belly—“many days yet; a hundred, a hundred and twenty.” “No,” I said, “less.” She laughed.

“Ah, no, you read your signs wrongly, girl. Kotta knows these things, and you are too small.” She poured me milk and I drank it slowly.

“Is it—” I felt for the words. “Is it yet summer?” “Yes, summer for many days and nights now. Soon we shall be moving east again.”

“The tower—when did the tower fall?” “Man’s business.” Kotta said. “I do not know, or care.” She went away from me, and busied herself at some chests I could hardly see in the gloom.

It was summer, then. How long had I lain beneath the tower? Many days, it seemed, many, many days.

A little pain from the milk twisted in my stomach.

Kotta returned to me with a basin of water and a black garment over her arm. She put it by me, and with a few deft movements stripped the ruins of the velvet off my body. She sponged the dirt from me, and applied a little salve to my cuts, but they were healing fast, though it seemed to me not as fast as I had healed before. Then she slipped the black cloth garment over my head and arms, and did up the lacings at the neck. Her hands came for the lynx mask, and instinctively I shied away.

I had not noticed her eyes till then, but now I caught the glint of them, very blue and still, and fixed on my face.

“Ettook must have the mask,” Kotta said. “It is his right. Later he will have a right to your body, when you are delivered of the child.”

“I must not show my face,” I whispered.

She gave a fox’s bark of laughter.

“Oh, so you learn the tribal ways so soon. That is good. Well, no fear that Kotta will see your face.

Kotta is blind.”

She said it in such a way as if she said it of another, using her name also as if she spoke of someone else.

It did not seem to distress her, at least, only as she would commiserate another woman’s loss. And, for a blind person, she was very deft.

Slowly, I drew the silver mask from my face, looking at her eyes. They did not flinch at all. I put the mask in her large strong hands, and drew on instead the strange familiarity of the shireen.

The dawn came, and I went to Ettook’s painted tent, walking at first but soon creeping, with head bowed and shoulders slumped, as I saw the other women did who were of no importance in the krarl.

Tathra would not creep, but then she was the wife of Ettook and, like his horse, had acquired some value from his interest.

I had thought, despite the early hour, Ettook would not be there with her, for I had come to imagine she wished to have me there on her own, to learn those City ways she had hoped I knew. But he was still there, on his back among the rugs, naked and snoring. And he did not snore as other men rhythmically—but in fits and starts after irregular intervals—great snarling, snorting explosions, that had a sound of wild pigs at war.

Tathra sat beside him, but when I entered she pushed the rugs away and rose. She wore no garment and no mask; as a slave, apparently, my eyes on her face counted for nothing. Despite her pregnancy, she was, as I had already been aware, incredibly lovely. There was a lushness to her, a ripeness, yet with no sense of excess, as sometimes there is in women who carry this kind of beauty. And she had delicacy, too, narrow slender hands and feet, catlike chin and eyes and nose, and a mouth that might have been painted it was such a perfect shape, and colored like a pale red flower.

She nodded at Ettook, and put two fingers on this witch’s mouth, in the warning I must be quiet. In sign language she pointed out perfumes and other cosmetics in a carved chest. Silently I washed her and applied her scents, and finally brushed her hair as she kneeled before a mirror of polished bronze. I did not feel in any way demeaned by this. She was too beautiful. I became aware of something in me which gave a kind of reverence to beauty—that special beauty I had seen in Asren, in the palace girl he had loved, and which now I found so unexpectedly among the tents of barbarians. I, after all, bore the curse of ugliness; even my body, which Darak had found lovely enough, was disfigured now.

I plaited strands of her hair and fastened on their ends little bells of silver. From a jar she took a blue cream and smeared it on her eyelids, and from another jar a red cream which she rubbed over her lips. I did not like her to do this. It offended me in some curious way, for it was neither necessary nor an improvement.

She got back among the rugs with him then, and a pang of anger clenched in my belly—not for myself, but for her, so special in her looks, to court the favor of the disgusting, snorting creature on its back at her side.

With gestures she sent me off for his food, and I made my way among the goats to the morning fire.

There were no men about that I could see, and the women at the pit called out shrilly at me. When I went nearer one picked up a piece of wood and threw it at me. It glanced off my shin, and they laughed raucously.

I rummaged in my mind for words.

“Tathra,” I said, “I am sent by Ettook’s wife—for the food for the chief.”

They muttered and drew together, and presently one of them, rather tall and full-breasted, with a vivid red-blonde tide of hair, came up to me and slapped me across the head. There was more laughter.

“You want food,” she said, “you ask me.”

“I ask you, then.”

“I ask—I ask—listen to the City one, the Eshkir.” She mimicked me, and was applauded. “I am Seel’s daughter,” she said. “You have angered Seel. Those who anger the seer do not feed among the tents.”

“Not for me—but for the chief, Ettook.”

She hit me again, casually, and before I had reckoned what I did, I had given her blow for blow, and she was on her back among bits of charcoal from the fire.

The women shrieked and screamed at me, and Seel’s daughter got up slowly, and then would have come running at me, but another voice cut across the clamor and they were still. Kotta stood at her tent door, her blind eyes which seemed to see fixing on each of us in turn, unerringly.

“What trouble are you causing, daughter of the seer? She wants only to serve the chief. She is Tathra’s now, so you should mind your manners with her.”

Seel’s daughter lifted the veil of her shireen a little and spat on the ground, then stamped on the spittle with obvious symbolism.

“Tathra,” she snapped, “out-tribe, spear-bride whore.” She stood away from the fire, and pointed to a row of cooking pots sitting on the flames. “Take, then, white-hair.” I went by her, and she hissed at me:

“You will remember later which one you struck.”

Reluctantly a woman filled platters for me, one with a kind of thin porridge smelling strongly of goat’s milk, one full of ripe black-red berries, a third with dark brown bread. There was also a jug of frothy beer which she ran off to fetch. The items were placed on a tray of stiffened woven matting and left on the ground for me to pick up. As I crouched to get it, a foot struck me in the side and I rolled over.

I did not know which of them had done it, but Kotta called out from her tent door, “No more of that.

She has a child in her. Ettook won’t thank you if you lose him a warrior with your bitch ways.”

I did not know how she realized what they had done. There had been little sound. I picked up the tray and hurried away from them, back to the painted tent.

Going in, I found Ettook was awake, sitting up and glaring at me.

“What were you at, slut?” he roared. “Did you have to do the berrying and brewing yourself before you could bring it?”

“The women—” I said.

He roared me into silence, and snatched the tray so that everything fluid on it slopped over the sides of its container. He began to thrust food into his mouth, while Tathra filled his silver-hound cup with beer.

Abruptly he snatched at her nearest breast in much the same way as he had snatched the tray. He laughed. Tathra nodded at me.

“Go now. I will have you brought when I need you.”

I turned and went out, and stood in the harsh sunlight, struggling with disgust.

The women were still at the fire, except for Seel’s daughter—gone to feed her father probably. Kotta also had gone in. I did not know what I was expected to do now.

I crept across the camp, and found a narrow stream running through the pines, a little beyond the tents. I wondered if I should follow this stream which would perhaps find a river course between the slopes of the dark mountains beyond the trees, a course which would guide me, not toward Eshkprek, but ultimately south, toward the unknown sea. Nothing, after all, bound me here.

I took half a step, and an unseen wall seemed to block my path. I do not know what it was, prescience, perhaps, perhaps only a desire for whatever security I could find, how ever precarious. I shook my head, as if to the stream and the road it might offer, and turned back into the krarl.

I found out soon enough what my duties were.

I had sat down in the dust near Kotta’s tent, puzzling a little over the blocked path at the stream, when the women called out their men and children to eat around the fire-pit. Not for them that first meal abed, which was Ettook’s right, and Seel’s too, presumably. I was roused to action by one of the krarl warriors, who dragged me to my feet, and cuffed me on the ear for sitting idle, and soon a thin woman, more anxious than unfriendly, recruited me to serve the men and boys their food, with all the other women. This took a while, and not once did the females of the camp eat, sit, or even stand still in the male presence. It was tradition with them, but they were more enslaved than the Dark People. Even I was less of a slave, for rebellion had stirred in me at last, and though I could do nothing about my lot, I did not accept it. The krarl women, even their little girls, did so wholeheartedly and without question; even Seel’s daughter, who ministered with the rest. When the men were done, they got to their feet, wiping their mouths, not glancing at their servitors, and went about their mens’ business: preparations for a hunt (for these ate meat, when they could get it), sharpening of knives, grooming of horses, and general important talk and discussion, not to be let slip into our ears. The boys slouched after in imitation. Their male glory began early, it seemed.

The women ate now, the scraps and bits of what was left, and, while the little girls played noisily at a distance, they, in their turn, talked women’s chatter. It was all that was allowed them, that inane mode of conversation which consisted of: their possessions, their expected possessions, their children and babies (possibly this could be classed under the previous heading), planning of food, planning of chores, their man’s prowess, either in bed or at hunting or at war, and jealousy for any woman either not present or out of earshot.

It was Tathra they maligned most, as she qualified on both points. Listening at the fringe of their circle about the fire, I gathered Ettook had won her from an enemy tribe in a fight a year ago. She was not yet accepted—the Out-Tribe Bitch they called her. They did not like it that Ettook’s favor had gone to her instead of to one of them; neither did they like her pregnancy, which could establish her further with him, particularly if she bore a son.

The women’s meal, however, was not long. Soon they were up, and I with them, to scrape out bowls and cups, and rinse them in the very stream I had come to before. In the course of this work, I went by that earlier boundary without thinking, and when I realized this, I did not at first understand, though I suppose the moment when I could have gone was finished, like all those moments when I might have escaped events in the past, and was prevented by some circumstance or emotion.

After this cleansing came a washing of garments and rugs, a rinsing and pounding at smelly items over the rocks. My back was aching when we were done. It was midday, and I half expected some rest, but they pegged out the clothes to dry on little cages of wood constructed for the purpose, and then ran back to the main camp to begin chores of darning, weaving, and sundry other wearisome tasks. The girl children had shown some interest in me, mainly in poking me and calling me names—in imitation of their mothers, as the boys’ indifference had been imitation of the warriors. Now they were sent off to play, and flew off into the pines, relishing this brief time of freedom.

Seel’s daughter had been at the washing and pegging, and I had expected every minute that she would hit me or worse, but she did nothing. Then, as we were walking to the tents, she came up beside me and half-whispered: “I have told my father, the seer, of how you struck me. He is angrier than before. There was a great store of gold in the tower, and your impudence made the warriors forget. Now it is too late to return, for we are already on Snake’s Road, and must go East. He will put a withering on you, Eshkir slut. Your bones and sinews will warp, and you will go crippled all your days.”

Despite myself, I turned sick when she said this. I had no respect for Seel’s powers, yet ill-wishing can do damage if hate is strong enough. But the worst thing one can do is to help the attacker by believing it.

“Seel-the-Goat’s spells will do no harm to me,” I said. “I have magic of my own—magic I have not loosed on him before because I was compassionate. Let him beware, not I.”

“You,” she snarled, “you cannot even speak our tongue.”

“There are other tongues than the mouth uses. Your father, if he is anything of what you say—which I doubt—will know it.”

She was silent, chewing reluctantly on what I had said. After a moment she gave me a push and hurried off.

I had to stop still then, and say to myself in my brain, He is nothing and cannot harm you. Deathcannot harm you, and the old man is less than Death.

But then the words came suddenly into my mind as I had seen them scratched on the wall of that tunnel through the Ring:

Death, the old dark man, is coming to carry you off...

The curse of humanity against my own Lost Race.

Instinctively my hands went to my breast for the jade I had torn from Shullatt’s neck, and did not find it.

As I stood there, a girl’s voice spoke.

“The Spear-Bride wants you.”

It was the best name they could find for Tathra among the tents.

I think I was glad to go to her, to leave my forlorn self outside. Ettook was no longer there. He had gone to join the hunt. She had me dress her and brush out her hair once again. She said little to me, and I guessed she was uncertain as to how she should approach me. What did she think I knew? Perhaps more than that quest for knowledge to keep her safe in Ettook’s liking, she needed another presence—if not friendly, then at least not actively hostile. We had a kind of kinship, she and I, not only in pregnancy, but because both of us were the captives and the unaccepted of the krarl.

3

Snake’s Road they called their way eastward, to the marshes and the fertile forest-land beyond; who made the track they did not seem to know. It was a passage down from higher mountain valleys to the rock plains and across, and it twisted and turned to find room for itself among crags and subsidences like the one-eyed serpent some of them worshipped, the symbol of which was hung from Seel’s stinking neck. Ettook’s people, along with many other tribal communities, sheltered in the higher places during the winter, began to make eastward in the late spring and early summer, and came to feed off the bountiful pastures of the eastlands when the year was at its full. Along the way there would be fights and battles, and skirmishes, too, at the final camping ground. Territory, however impermanent, was hard won.

Two days after I had come among them, the tents were dismantled, pack horses laden, and we set off.

There were vast stores of food dried by the women in those moments when they were not tending their men. Meat from the hunt—kill hung from horseback to dry in the sun, dripped blood, and attracted colonies of flies. The warriors rode some way ahead, disdaining the slow pace of the women, who walked or shared a few mules between them. Children ran about, occasionally remembering to drive the goats as they were supposed to do. The goats, meanwhile, milled around the track, maa -ing discontentedly, and watchdogs barked, and ran to lick up blood and gorged flies spilled from the strung carcasses.

Tathra rode a black mule, partly because of her status, partly because of her pregnancy. The mule was hers, and therefore no other had a right to it, and they grumbled at that. Kotta also rode, a privilege of her blindness, yet she seemed to see as well as any of us from the way she looked at things—deer bucks fighting on a distant level of the plain, birds wheeling overhead. When you talked to her, she would look intently in your face. It occurred to me that perhaps she retained a little of her sight, however dim, and traded on it, though this did not seem to be her character. And besides, she had witnessed me unmasked and had shown no reaction, and once I saw her bend near the fire with her eyes still raised to the woman she listened to, and there was no narrowing of the pupils. She was indeed sightless. I reasoned then that perhaps her other senses had sharpened to compensate the loss, and this was what had made her appear so aware of all things.

A camp was made at the end of each day’s journeying, a little aside from the track. Seel would bless our setting out on it each morning, one hand on the serpent amulet.

Around us, the wild jumbled land ran away from the mountains. There were water pools in plenty, and glades of dark thin trees, but otherwise the summer heat pressed on us and drank us dry. I lived on goat’s milk, and did not like it much. I brushed Tathra’s hair in the first cool of dusk, before Ettook came in to her from the big evening meal around the fire, drunk, greasy, and belching.

I slept my nights in the open, which did not matter greatly in such mild weather, and yet it was a symbol of my little worth. None of the warriors troubled me; it was a rule with them not to lie with a woman once she showed her womb filled, though I had not noticed Ettook daunted by this ruling where Tathra was concerned.

My breasts grew larger and uncomfortable with milk, and I began to have pains in my back, and at the base of my spine.

“What is the matter?” Kotta said to me. Perhaps I had made an audible protest at the pain, but I did not think so. I told her my trouble, and she asked Ettook for a mule. It must have been the old argument—one more male for the tribe—for the mule was mine, and I rode after Tathra from then on.

Seel did not come near me, and if he had cast his spell, I knew nothing of it.

It was a monotonous traveling, but dullness can be preferable to certain other things.

On the ninth day out on the road, near sunset, there was some agitation among the warriors up ahead.

We were passing through a narrow gully, where the track took up the path of a dried-out stream bed.

Rocks went up on either hand, trees leaning over us from roots clawed into the rock side, and swaying darkly on the tops like plumes on a metal helm. Above, among those trees, the warriors had seen some movement, it appeared, not animal in origin.

Once this news trickled back to the van of women and goats, weak panic broke out among both. An enemy tribe, planning to attack us from the gully roof? Yet there was no attack then. We reached higher ground, and night came.

They made camp in the shelter of other rocks, and piled rocks around the three open sides as an improvised stockade, and lit brushwood fires on the inside of this. In the red light, warriors stood sentry, and there was a look on their faces of taut pleasure. It was good to fight. A sign of virility in the tribes of the valleys to have taken many women, fathered many sons, but best of all, to have slain many men. The women huddled near the main fire, chattering nervously as if purposely overacting fear in order to make their men’s bravery the more obvious. I sat at my post, a little way from Ettook’s tent, sewing without interest or accuracy at a bit of cloth. The cloth, in other hands, might have become a carrying bag of sorts, but it was, for me, only an excuse for labor. They did not like women in the krarl to be idle; this way I seemed employed, yet truly was not. Grouped at the wall fires, Ettook and his elder warriors were drinking and laughing.

Abruptly, hoof sounds opened the night. Silence fell in the camp. At once a man’s figure, a horse shape, flying mane and hair showed, caught in the flame glare. Shouted words I could not grasp, an arm upraised, and something flung over the stockade of stones to bite deep in the soil. The rider turned again, mount rearing, and was gone, swift as he had come. Ettook ran to the thrown thing, pulled it up, and shook it—a pointed stave about four feet in length, tied with strips of scarlet wool, and ringed three times with white clay.

“War spear!” Ettook cried with a fierce joy in his voice.

Shouts went up. The warriors leaped and lifted their arms. The women came closer together—except for one, the tall daughter of the seer. She rose and went among the tents for her father, and was soon back with him.

Seel raised a bony hand, and clutched the one-eyed serpent with the other.

“War dance,” he called out, and the warriors cheered.

As if it were a signal, all the women got to their feet and ran into their various tents, all but Seel’s daughter and myself. They did not see me in the dark tent shadow. Seel’s daughter carried over her arm a black robe, which now she put on her father. Over it were embroideries of many colors, barbaric depictions of sun and moon, tree and mountain, sea and fire. He shook out the wide sleeves, folded his arms, and began to intone some ritual chant which had no meaning for me. The warriors drew back in a half-circle, and into the space between the seer and Ettook and his men slunk the girl, hair like one of the flame tongues all around her. She spat on the ground left and right, and made a sprinkling action around the half-circle with her fingers. Seel’s chant came to an end, and his daughter ran at once to Ettook, and Ettook clasped her to him. That she was the symbolic intermediary between man and the power of magic was clear, that she would now give herself to the chief was also clear. Perhaps sexual arousement was integral in their war frenzy. The warriors’ feet began to stamp as Ettook’s large and uncouth hands traveled the snake-writhing body of Seel’s daughter.

“No, not for you,” a voice said, Kotta’s voice, at my shoulder.

I got up. I had no real wish to see their blood-lusts rise in the fire-lurid dark. We went among the shadows to the tent, and slipped inside.

“Had they found you, girl,” she said to me, “it would be a beating or worse, perhaps. Even Seel’s daughter must hide her eyes in her father’s tent when they’ve done with her.”

“When will they fight?” I asked.

“Tomorrow. Daybreak. It is man’s work.”

I laughed. “I too have fought and killed, Kotta. It is the work of fools, not men.”

And then I sat very still, for a great truth had come to me out of my own mouth, as if another spoke it. I had indeed killed, not only with sword blade but with thought, also. I, in my hubris, slew and wounded, and because of it my Power had left me. It was quite obvious to me in that moment.

I bowed my head and whispered, “What have I done?”

Kotta said nothing. She took up my sewing and began to unpick it.

After a while I said, “I am blind also, Kotta of the tribe.” I did not care what I told her, whether she believed or not. A slow procession of words came from my mouth, in which Darak and Vazkor, Asren and Asutoo, Mazlek and Maggur, the Sirkunix and the War March were inextricably mixed. She could not have understood, but she recognized the need in me to speak. When I was still, she, too, was still.

We sat quiet for an hour or more in the dark tent, while outside their feet thudded among the red flicker, and they invoked their gods and the savagery within themselves.

After that time, I lay back on the rugs to sleep, and it was then she spoke to me, as if our conversation had had no break.

“Now I will tell you something. Kotta was born blind to the krarl—in the last years of Ettook’s father, it was. A blind one is no use, as a cripple boy is no use, for he cannot ride to war. In a way, a blind woman is worse, for she may bear blind children, so I might not go to a man—had any wanted Kotta, which none did. But I was let live, for I learned my chores quickly, and could do most things as well, or better, than the womenfolk with whole eyes. And I learned to tend the sick, and help the women bear, so I am useful among the tents. Now tell me, one of Eshkir, why do you say Kotta is blind?”

I lay in the dark, and I answered as if she had prompted me: “Kotta is not blind.”

“Yes,” she said. “But Kotta does not look out through two sockets in her head, which men call seeing.

Kotta looks inward, and there everything is. I did not know that I was blind until I was in my tenth year.

When they told me, I did not understand, for I could see, and I thought they saw too, in the same fashion, looking in, not out.” She had unpicked my work on the cloth, and began again. “What color is this cloth?”

she asked me.

“Blue.”

“Now what is blue? I have never seen blue. But I have seen colors you also have never seen, nor any who look outward. I turn to the sky and I see birds, but they are not as you see them, and I see men, but not as men see men.”

“In your tent,” I said softly, “when I took off the mask what did you see of me, Kotta?”

“Something I have not seen before. Put your hand into cool water when the day is hot. That is what I saw.”

“Kotta,” I said sharply, “I am ugly beyond ugliness; did you not see that?”

“To yourself, and to others perhaps,” she said, “but to Kotta, beauty. Beauty I have not seen before.

Beauty which is a fire and yet does not burn.”

“Your inner eye has misled you,” I said to her.

There was silence from beyond the tents. I got up from the rugs, and went to sleep in the open, curled among the rocks, cushioning my sore breasts with my arms. It seemed their man-magic had spread into her mind and mine, despite an averted gaze. Her words tormented me and I ran from her.

What bitterness she should see so well, and yet so falsely. And tomorrow they would fight.

4

I woke late, stiff and chilled in spite of the warming sun, and with a sense of wrongness—whether in the world or in myself I did not know.

I came out into the camp. There was no fire burning, though ashes in plenty strewn from last night’s ritual.

A wandering goat stared at me superciliously. Silence hovered. It was a strange thing; apart from the goat and myself there seemed no one else here, and yet I felt there was. I picked a way over the broken ground, churned up further by stamping feet. Torn-off tassels lay about, and there was some blood not human, but from a war sacrifice they had made, as if their own and others’ deaths were not enough. I reached the nearest tent, lifted the flap, and looked inside. The tent was empty. I crossed the track the women had already created, walking back and forth to the little waterfall on leatherbound hard feet, carrying pitchers. Three more tents, and into each one I thrust my search, and found nothing. I reached the fall where a spring burst in constant crystal urination from the lichen-stained rock, pouring into its own narrow well in the ground. No jars here now, and no sign that they had come today. My skin began to tingle. I turned to look over my shoulder many times. Was this some part of their battle I had missed—an invasion and taking? Yet, if they had been taken, why had I heard no sound of it? And there were no signs of violence.

Something nudged me in the side.

I cried out, flung sideways, rolled and scrambled upward, my hands reaching to grasp knives I no longer possessed.

My attacker—the goat—regarded me with mild amazement, and shook its head. I had begun to curse it when a sudden sharp spike of pain split my body. I bent over gasping, and, as if this were penance enough, was released from the vise as suddenly as I had been seized. Like the goat, I shook my head as if to shake the last vestige of the pain from me, and in that moment a woman shrieked, her cry, in the silence, seeming to fill the whole camp.

It was no ghost scream, too real, too large to be imagined.

I ran at once toward it, though I cannot judge why. It had occurred to me I was not courageous, had never been brave, only arrogant or unthinking.

Kotta’s tent. It was quiet now. The dry throat rattle of some bird started up in a thicket. I pulled open the flap and looked in. It was very dark, but I could see the blind woman crouched by an iron pot set on the little brazier.

“Kotta.”

She looked up.

“The Eshkir,” she said. “So they left you too. Good. You can help me.”

“But where have they gone?”

“The men to fight,” she said, “the women to hide. It’s always the way, in case the camp is taken.”

“Why not you also, Kotta?”

“I have work to do, and so has she. We shall be too busy to run off into the rocks.”

I looked where she pointed, and saw Tathra lying on the rugs. The brazier picked out beads of sweat on her uncovered face like little red glass jewels. She twisted and murmured to herself, and then abruptly tautened, and began a series of awful grunts, louder and louder, until at last she reached the summit of her agony, and shrieked once more as I had heard her do from the fall.

My impulse was to go to her, quiet her. I recalled Illka, the girl who died in the ravine, and was still.

Besides, what could I do now? Kotta drew the iron from the brazier, poured out thick liquid into a clay bowl, and took it to Tathra. She raised her head on one big arm and made her drink.

“A while yet,” Kotta said. “This will ease you.”

Tathra’s head fell back. Her large frightened eyes closed themselves.

“Useless,” she moaned. “Ettook will die in the fight, and they will kill me.”

After this, she seemed to doze, only murmuring from time to time incoherently.

Kotta laid out her things, primitive shapes of metal which bore a little resemblance to physicians’

instruments in the Cities. She set water to boil, and when it boiled away, sent me for more water at the fall.

The day dragged by and thickened into a brassy late afternoon light. I went outside, and looked around from the vacated camp. Nothing seemed stirring. I had asked Kotta where their place of battle was, but she did not know, or care. And it would be useless to look for them yet. If they won their fight it would be the other’s camp they would go to, for the women and the beer.

The black figure of a bird on long ragged wings wheeled over the sky, and away.

I rubbed my back, which was full of a thin relentless ache, and went in again to endure the rest of the vigil.

A hot summer moon rested lazily over the camp when Tathra’s child finally decided it would be free of her.

It seemed foolish for me to hate the child; it obeyed an instinct as old as woman herself, had no choice, and no doubt suffered also. Yet I hated it for the pain and terror it caused her, and through her and her shrieks and prayers to unknown gods, caused me.

Kotta had known it would be bad for her, though she had said nothing. Now she did what she could, but it was little enough at this time, for the machinery of birth was locked in Tathra, and could not be oiled or operated from outside. I gave her my hands, one after the other, and she tore them with her teeth and nails like a frenzied animal in a trap. All the black night hours she screamed in the tent, and the darkness wore itself down against us like a sharp knife blunting its edge on our nerves.

Toward dawn she lost consciousness and lay still. Her face was gray and shriveled, her body soaked in sweat. The waters had broken an hour before, and the tent smelled strong of blood. Kotta massaged her limbs, felt at her belly, under which the contractions rippled like sea-waves.

“Bad,” she said. “The child is wrongly placed. I feared as much.”

I helped her turn Tathra on her side, and kneeled so that her back could rest against me. Kotta took her copper instruments to the water and dipped them.

“I will do it now,” she said, “while she feels nothing. You are a strong one. If she wakes, you must hold her still.”

I put my arms around Tathra’s arms, and grasped her. Kotta came, and I looked away from what she did, abruptly squeamish and faint, despite the death I had seen and been the cause of. After a moment, I felt Tathra’s body quicken. She came awake in one frightful lunging effort.

“Hold her,” Kotta cried out, and it was very hard. My bones seemed snapped by her frantic twisting—and then she jerked twice, and she screamed as she had not screamed before, a mindless, unpremeditated scream, which was all one surprised, unbelieving accusation. Between the copper crab pincers of Kotta’s birth tongs, lay the body of a child, which had come from the womb feet first in its hurry to be out. So tiny, this thing which had caused such great distress.

“Ettook has a son,” Kotta said.

“Is it over?” Tathra sobbed, her eyes fast shut. “Is it finished?”

“All over, all finished,” Kotta said. She cut the cord with her knife.

I let Tathra onto her back, and presently Kotta pressed gently on her body and the afterbirth left her.

Then into that new soft silence rang another noise, a commotion that came from the forgotten world beyond the tent.

“They are back,” Tathra said dreamily.

“Back or not, you will rest now. Ettook can wait to see his child.”

“His son,” Tathra said. She had not even opened her eyes to look at it, yet she knew herself safe now, held fast by that symbol of her worth. A bearer of warriors.

I slipped out of the tent to watch them come up between the rocks, and I felt a heady contempt. They were drunk and bloody, tattered like hawks from a sky fight, tipping back their red-plaited heads to drink from leather beer-skins. After them came a string of valley horses loaded with stolen gear: weapons, food, jewelry, and a train of out-tribe women, whimpering from the rough treatment they had already suffered and premonitions of further rough treatment to come. They were redheads, too, a krarl half kin to this one, yet still fair game.

They jumped over their own stockade, knocking stones out of it, and bawling with laughter. Soon the krarl women would come forth from their hiding place to tremble, admire, and feast the heroes. The camp, from being dry and empty, was now one fluid red riot of motion under the sun-broken sky.

Kotta came out beside me.

“I must go and see to their wounds,” she said.

“Their wounds?” The scorn was very bitter in my mouth.

“Either I go to them or they will come for me. Take care of her in my tent.”

“You had better tell Ettook he has a son. He will need telling; it has cost him nothing that he should otherwise know it.”

“Not even that perhaps,” Kotta said. “The child is small and weak. I doubt it will live through the day.”

I went back into the tent and kneeled by Tathra. She was sleeping, drained but peaceful, yet there was a dead look to her; part of her beauty was wrecked on the night, and the rebuilding might never come now.

The boy lay at her side, in the wicker basket they used for their newborn. I looked at him for a long while, but then I went away and sat at the back of the tent. My belly and spine were all one continuous throb of hurt, and I had known for some time now that my womb was near to emptying itself. I did not feel afraid, perhaps because I was too tired. Besides, Tathra seemed to have borne for both of us, her trouble was so terrible. I could not believe whatever was in store for me could be as bad.

Outside the noise increased, thudding angrily. I heard women’s voices and the sizzle of meats on spits. It was full daylight.

After a while a sharp knife came and pierced me, and red liquid ran free. I curled over and thrust against the thing inside me, my torn hands tight around the pole of the tent. If you will to be free of me, then go, I thought at it. There seemed a response, very swift and hard. This thing is too big for me and will never get out, I thought, but I thrust again at it, and my muscles cracked, complaining, and I felt it move. There was a brief interval then, but I felt the shifting pulse, and knew, and finally I pushed down at it with every ounce of my strength and rejection. I seemed to thrust a great stone forth from a cliff, saw it hang, ovoid and bloody, in my brain’s eye. Then a new pain answered, and I cried out, shocked at it, a long cry that ended differently in triumph, for I knew I had at length succeeded, and was rid of my haunting forever.

Away from me, but still chained, rolled the image of my hatred, the curse Vazkor had put on me. I reached for Kotta’s knife, and severed that final bondage, knotting it close to the child, then crouching and dispelling the afterbirth from me. “It was with as little trouble as this that my child was born.

My child, the son of Vazkor.

After I had sponged myself clean, I washed it in the brazier light, looking at it, yet not seeing. It was very small, as Tathra’s son had been, yet perfectly formed, compactly healthy, despite the time I had given it in Belhannor, and the other times circumstances had tried it with since then. It had a pale skin, pearly in the half-dark tent, unfocused black eyes, a wisp of black hair, the legacy of its sire. (I cannot say father; he mated us as another man would mate horses.) I felt no stirring of emotion, not even triumph or dislike now. I removed Tathra’s dead baby from its wicker tomb, and replaced it with my own. I did not even stop to think. The act seemed logical, precise, and very neat.

It waved its small hands at me, and rubbed its restless head on the soft lining of the basket.

When she was stronger, Tathra would wake and give it milk, and it would grow to its manhood among the tents of Ettook, dark-haired, dark-eyed, pale-skinned for its out-bride mother, possessing—what gifts? I could only guess at that. What a viper I might have left them—what a serpent to bite them long after I was gone. Would Kotta guess? Perhaps she who seemed to see might see this difference too—but who would believe her? Tathra would not dare.

I wrapped Tathra’s dead baby in one of the filthy rugs, picked up my bundle and went to the tent flap.

The feast was merry some way from this place, fire smoke, noise, movement, singing.

I slipped between the rocks, reached the unmanned stockade, and got over it.

I felt neither weakness nor remorse of any kind. My decision had been too quick, too abrupt, and yet I think I had known it long before, without realizing. There was no surprise in me at what I had done, what I did.

It was a steep treacherous way down from the krarl. After about half an hour’s scrambling, I became aware of weariness and physical pain. Out of sight and sound of the camp, I crawled into a deep crevasse, hung over by yellow, sun dried bushes, and slept.

Pitch-black night hung in the entrance when I woke.

I eased a way out, and stiffly took up my walk again, still clutching my morbid bundle. At last there was a waterway, very narrow and brown, but here the ground was softer underfoot. I made a mud grave for the thing I carried, then worked downstream, my feet in the cool water.

I came to trees under a high moon. The light was transparent indigo, and the trunks stood up like dim dark pillars irregularly carved, and supporting moonlight on their latticed arms. Mosses, stones, leaf-growths struggling beneath my feet. A warm, a silent night.

I had not considered, even, that they might come after me. They were too busy with their victory, and besides, I was of little worth. I lay to sleep again in the open, not thinking of men, or of animals hunting.

Not thinking of anything at all.

And waking, with the thin gold of morning pouring through rents in the sky, it occurred to me not only that I was free, but also that for the first time since I had come from the Mountain, I had acted alone. No external motivation, no influence of another, but an action sprung from, executed by my own brain.

The morning chill, the unrelieved pressure of milk in my breasts, the ache between my thighs, seemed a small price to pay for it.

5

A little mound of leaning stones.

So familiar to me, yet I could not seem to remember why, as I lay under the trees looking toward them.

Some way off, and beyond them, the sound of the stream I had followed the night before. Yes, that surely was the answer: the stones marked water. My body and my mouth were thirsty for water. I rose, every joint cracking, and walked between the trees to the stones, and looked down. It might have been a different stream, fast flowing here, gold-lit and glassy. I had not noticed in the tired dark. I stripped the black shift, and stood knee-high in the current, laving my skin with the coolness, drinking from my cupped hands until the mouth veil of the shireen lay wet and heavy at my throat, and my hair plastered in soaking white strings on my flesh. I ran my hand over my belly, the skin still flaccid, the deflated bag of birth, nevertheless tautening itself quickly. Soon muscle and flesh would be firm and whole. I, with my unique gift of self-healing, rejoiced, splashing in the stream.

I became aware of the other presence slowly. Looking up at last, I met a pair of icy yellow eyes, and was confused for a moment in my joy, because I had not before thought yellow a shade capable of such coldness. Around the eyes a gray streak-furred animal face, teeth points showing delicately above the jaw, ears flattened and tufted—a wild cat of the rock valleys, and probably on a quest for food.

We stared at each other, this well-equipped, well-armored hungry thing, and I, naked in the water, without a knife to defend myself, and with no Power left to stun or kill. At another time I would have thought the cat very beautiful. It began gracefully to pick a way down the bank toward me, the pines behind it thrusting at the sky, throwing shadows now, striped as its coat. At the last moment it looked away, dipped its head, and drank from the stream, perhaps two feet from where I stood. I could smell its musky odor. Its tongue made crisp pink motions, reminding me of Uasti’s cat. After a while it lifted its water-beaded face, turned, and leaped back the way it had come, vanishing in the trees beyond the leaning stones.

Luck. It had eaten possibly after all, and had had no need of my meat. I began to shiver uncontrollably, scrambling from my bath, scrubbing my body with handfuls of dry grass until the action and the warm sun dried me.

Pulling on my shift, my hand struck the stone pile. One small pebble rattled loose and fell down into the stream where the current pulled it away. I watched that pebble go, and at once I saw an arrow in its place, and I remembered—the streams above the ravine, the river in the woods where Kel’s arrow had floated, snapped in half because it had touched an evil place. An altar of sacrifice—old as the ravineitself. I’ve heard them say some black god or other still broods here... And I had lain here, rejoiced here, and the wild cat had not touched me.

Freedom was so brief, despite my joy. There was no freedom. I carried my darkness on my back everywhere I went.

I ran from the stream, through the woods in the morning. Birds beat up from my path. When I could ran no longer, I walked, swiftly, and without much thought. A steep way and many trees. I had no sense of direction. I snatched a few berries from a bush, and wept like a spoiled child when the stomach pains came to plague me.

The day passed, and night came when I was high on a rocky road, climbing from the woods to the darkening sky. I slept in a cave place, curled up small for there was little room, and I dreamed of a white marble chamber where I lay on a silk bed, a child by my side in a golden cradle. A pink baby, blue-eyed, with a trace of yellow hair.

“This is the child of Asren Javhovor,” I said, then the doors opened, but the dark man with the black-masked face strode by me with a sword uplifted, phallic and menacing. The blade swung and crashed across the crib. I saw how black hair curled closely on the back of the strong neck, for the murderer was Darak.

I did not know where I was making for, though I guessed I must long since have left that way Ettook’s people named Snake’s Road; no trace of a track remained. It was a dangerous land, peopled with wild beasts and the wild tribes of Ettook’s kind. Yet I saw no men, neither did they see me, presumably—or I would have been dragged away by them for their fun. Animals I glimpsed were of the timid variety: long-horned slender deer, winding sinuous gray snakes, birds, and russet squirrels. Once at twilight four wolves ran through a rock cut far below, and spurred me to climb into a deeper cave for sleep. Across the vistas of the hills and woods by night, the weird barks and screeches of things echoed hollowly. I felt I had no part in this lived-in country, an intruder without rights or the ability to survive. I ate red berries which made me vomit, and realized I had been poisoned. The hem of my shift I had torn off at the knee, and the rest was tattered and frayed. I drank from glassy streams or at the brown mirrors of round pools where frogs clustered, croaking in the dusk. My milk began to dry in me.

Ten days I traveled, without comfort or much intelligence, and with no destination in mind. On the eleventh day the land began to alter. It leveled and flattened, rocks faded back into the soil. From a dark crisp world, angular with stones and pines, it became a gray-green world, fluid and sloping.

The twelfth day. No longer the sharp, bittersweet scents of the highland, but smoke-mists clinging in the nostrils, stinging; mists so fine you could scarcely see them, only the effect they had upon distant things.

The sky was a hot metallic shield over many pools, reed beds, muddy places, steaming. The bird calls were different. Clouds of insects buzzed. At night I lay where the ground was driest, without thought of any bonus of safety, and whitish phosphorus moved between one stretch of water and the next. I had reached the marshes.

On the fifteenth day, my fourth in the marshes, I was weak and angry. The water was not any good to drink—I had tried it, and I knew. Apart from a few berries, some of which were poisonous. I had not eaten since I left Ettook’s krarl. My breasts, still slightly tender and swollen with the unused milk, led me to wonder if I could feed myself from my own body—but they were not well-placed for such an endeavor, and I had no vessel other than my hands. I struggled a while, milking myself, trying to be cow, cowherd, and bucket at once, and, in frustration, saw the nourishment spurt thinly onto the ground. I cursed my breasts, a curse to which, luckily, they did not succumb.

I became dizzy from the mosquitoes’ drone, and lay through the noon heat in the rush shade.

On the seventeenth day I came to a vast place of water, shallow, the ruined green of an old glass goblet.

Trees grew out of it, smooth—full of liquid, ancient bends of brown marble leaning over or away from their own marbled reflections, spilling lank leaves among the reed drifts, all one colorless color that could be given no name. I began to cross this water, the mud sucking at my soles, the greenness, however, only reaching to my knees. Gray heat drizzled on my eyes, and I thought at first I imagined the shape ahead of me. Then I reasoned it was a tall, particularly thick-boled tree, then a stand of trees. Finally I realized it was the ruin of a tower made of old white stone, and around the ruin was a wedge of land solid as an island in the low water. I stopped very still, and listened. Over the insect hum and slight viscous swash of water, I heard sounds, sounds familiar and unloved and unlooked-for. Man.

Like an animal, I crouched back against the nearest tree, afraid of the hunters. And, like an animal, a single connective thought stirred in me. Man. Food. Where he settled, settled his cook pots, and his tents, even here, in the marshland.

Very quietly now, I slid toward the island. At the bank, I crawled among the rushes, and forward through thick springy undergrowth. I lay about forty feet behind the tower ruin, almost flat to the ground, and peered out. And saw them.

A krarl, this I could see, and yet...

They were not Ettook’s breed, that was certain. Their hair was long, unbraided, shining like black fire, their skins very dark, almost as black as that hair. Moving about their fires, among their black hide tents, in black clothes, I could tell they had an instinctive elegance of movement, a physical beauty, a narrow, hard, sculptured look, that made them seem unreal. White tower, black tribe, glint of metal and ornaments and fire. Yes, another nomad people, traveling east across the marshes, as Ettook’s krarl had planned to do. Yet—they were not on Snake’s Road.

I lay in my hiding place all day, watching them, waiting for the dark. On the whole they were very silent.

Tall, slight, grave children played games with white squares, cross legged in tent mouths. Toward sunset women cooked food at separate fires, and sat with their men to eat. I was very hungry. I began to notice only what they did with the food. Red sun-stains dripped across the water. I bit my tongue, stomach burning, and drifted into a half-sleep of longing.

Water, trees, and island one reflective glimmering turquoise in the dark. They seemed to have set no sentry.

I eased forward until I reached the base of the tower. No sound at all. I eased forward until I reached the banked-up smolder of the first fire. I had noticed a collection of about twenty goats, earlier, penned on the other side of the tower, and I was tensed as I moved for them to begin bleating (they are better than watchdogs usually), but I had not apparently disturbed their goat-sleep. I searched by the fire and found nothing. Unlike Ettook’s men, they were not careless as they ate, unfortunately. No help for it then, but to go farther into the camp.

I prowled among the hide tents, my eyes very wide. Between the dull red crusts of embers I searched carefully, and found a scatter of tasteless crumbs. Horses—surely they had horses with them? And perhaps the stores might be there—yet they did not seem to have horses or wagons or carts. I paused by a tent shape, lifted the flap so slowly it and my fingers seemed to creak like a rusty door.

Inside—blackness, black curled figures and the smooth sounds of their sleep. And—! My hand snaked out before I could stop it. Three grayish cakes lying by the flap on a dish, and a little pitcher of water.

They might have been put there for me to take. It was all I could do to stop myself from eating then and there in that unsafe place. I dragged myself away, out of the camp, back to my shelter. There I drank deeply, and crammed my mouth with food, which tasted pleasantly of honey for all its color. It was the first time I had ever been truly hungry, with a desire for actual food. When I was finished, I dug out a scoop in the soft earth and buried the empty pitcher. Slowly I slid myself into the water, and trod carefully back into the shelter of the bending trees, some way from the island. One of these, with a cradle of low-slung branches, offered me a bed. I crawled into it, and, despite the raging pain in my belly, fell suddenly asleep.

I had not been sure that they would even notice the theft—which was stupid of me; to a traveling people not of great wealth, all things of life must be accounted for.

In the morning there were startled cries, though not many. They were philosophic in their loss. No one came searching.

That day, too, they gathered themselves and moved on, away from the tower, going on foot, carrying their gear. A heavy mist had come down, and for some reason I went after them in its cover. Perhaps it was the need for food, though that, for the present, was gone. Still, I did not know how long I must travel before I reached clean water and edible berries. Or perhaps, at that time, I had become so used to living among people, I needed their presence near me. I had not liked my time alone in the rock valleys. And yet, I think it was as it had always been—something drew me, something ordered the disorder of my life.

While the mists held, following was easy. Once out of the water, the soft ground masked most sounds, and I could find their tracks if I lost them. I think it gave me a peculiar pleasure, too, to hunt them in this way, like an animal. Especially because they sensed me, and grew uneasy. Goats, women, and children now went in the middle, the thirty or so men moved around them, long sharp spears in their hands. I could not properly understand their tongue, which once more was new to me, but, from a word here and there, I gathered they thought it was indeed a beast which followed them, one of the carnivores of the rocks, strayed because of hunger, for the marsh held nothing fiercer than hand-span lizards.

I was a fool to keep behind them once I knew what they thought, but I think I had become half-animal in the wild, half-cat perhaps, after that encounter by the leaning stones. After three days of our partnership, the mist lifted, and I dropped back into the greenish reeds which were very tall here. They made their camp long before sunset, on a solid stretch of ground some way down from where I lay. There was a different feel to the land—better and cleaner. A river ran along the skyline. The reeds moved with a crisp, not a sluggish, sound.

There were many fires in which they stuck their sharp wood spears to harden them. They were so businesslike, there was so little paraphernalia, I did not realize for some while they were organizing a hunt.

Cold terror then. Yet more animal still than anything. I did not think to go into their camp openly—had never thought of it. Now I turned and maneuvered a way through the reeds.

I suppose I left smeared tracks-marks—the bruised and broken reeds. They were hunters after all. The sun was dipping low when I heard the first sound of them behind me.

In among the tall reeds I lost myself and my senses failed me; I seemed to hear them coming from every direction at once. I panicked and ran in circles. When the first dark shape parted the green curtain, I crouched low against the ground, and growled in my throat, because I could not remember any words, and I was all anger, fear, fury. I had not realized how the wild places had deprived me of the last vestige of myself, and I did not realize it then. Other shapes broke through the reeds and stood still, as the first had done.

There was a long silence, and in the silence the cat-fear lust drained out of me. I stood up and looked at the nearest hunter. His face was very still, carved almost, yet he was surprised; his eyes gave it away at once. He said something to me. I did not understand. I shook my head. He made gestures with his hands and after a time I realized what he was asking: You followed us? I nodded. He smiled, and made a sweep toward the way they had come, then pointing to me, his eyebrows lifted. Incredible. He had said: Do you wish to come with us? They were being kind to me and tolerant, and I could not grasp it. Yet I grasped the hard fact. I shook my head in denial. No, I did not want to go with them. A rash thing to do, they might have killed me. But they did not. He nodded, turned, walked away through the reeds, and the other men followed him.

I still did not believe what had occurred until some moments after they were out of sight.

Then it came to me what I had been offered, and by whom. I ran after them, and caught them among the reeds, and they turned and looked at me inquiringly. I felt like a silly child when I nodded to them. The leader smiled again and walked on with his men, looking back only once to see if I were following.

1

The day after I had come among them, the black tribe gained the river I had seen on the skyline, and crossed the brown water, either swimming or aided by those who could swim. There were tangles of rushes on the other side, and beyond that a drier, curving plain, dotted with many hanging trees, a species of vivid willow, shivering their lime-green hair over the stretches of water which still possessed the landscape.

They set their tents, tethered and milked their goats with sure narrow hands. I had learned little of them, except that they were calm, unquestioning, and generous, which had been quickly obvious. They had looked at me, not stared, when I had followed their chief into the krarl. They had offered me food, which I had refused, being no longer hungry. I could understand nothing of their tongue, but by signs and facial gesticulations, they let me know that I was welcome to travel with them and share their shelter. They asked for nothing in return. They indicated one of the black tents where I was to sleep, in company with two young unmarried women. I thought these two might resent this, but they gave no sign of it. One took me and showed me a secluded pool where I could wash, and gave me a black garment to replace my rags. Coming back from this excursion, having forgotten how to manage a long hem among reeds and brambles, the cloth caught on some thorn or other, and I stumbled. The girl caught my arm and helped me get free, smiling gravely when I thanked her. I had thought the difference in our skins might make me an object of loathing to them, yet I sensed no allergy in her touch. She had made me understand her name was Huanhad.

Dusk smothered the reeds, and she cooked a little meal on a fire by our tent. The two girls sat to eat, and again offered the food to me. I shook my head. Huanhad pointed to my shireen, and made a play of averting her eyes. It seemed she thought I could not eat in it. The women of the black krarl went unmasked, though apparently were acquainted with the female taboos of other tribes; Huanhad had not attempted to remove the mask, though she helped me remove my ruined shift. Again I shook my head, and they returned to their eating.

They came early to sleep, but first placed within the door flap three of the grayish cakes and a pitcher of water, exactly like the arrangement I found when I came among them to steal food. That night I was puzzled, but later, as I learned something of their tongue, I discovered that the cakes and water were an offering to their gods, put out freshly by each tent every night, so that any wandering deity might eat and drink if he chanced on the krarl in the darkness. No wonder there had been an outcry when they found an offering gone.

In the morning, before we set out for the river, their chief came to the tent. He managed to tell me about the crossing, and that the tribe was making east, yet not as I had thought to the fertile lands, but toward the sea. His name, he explained, was Qwenex, and he politely expressed the wish that they might name me also. As I was so ignorant of their tongue, a personal name might be essential, perhaps might even save my life if called to me in time of danger, when nothing else would make sense. I indicated that I had no name. He showed no particular surprise. He touched my forehead gently, and said the single word,

“Morda.” It was, I found afterward, their name for ivory.

We spent two days traveling in the willow-green land beyond the river. Little waterways trickled by us, making, as we were, for the sea. In the dusk of the second day, coming from among the trees, I saw a small herd of horses at the stream on the slope below. They were wild, there could be no doubt of that, nor of their beauty; neither were they the mad man-devourers of the Eshkorek valleys. Their long heads dipped and lifted, arched necks turned, and the black oval gems of eyes stared at us. I thought they would leap the stream and run from us in the way of all wild horses, but they made no move to go. We went by them quietly, and they gave way to us. I saw Huanhad reach up her hand, and a black silk head reached downward in turn to brush her shoulder. Their leader nodded to Qwenex as he passed. They seemed neither afraid nor disdainful. Perhaps they sensed that these men at least would not leap high on their backs, choke them and break them, and burn out their strong lungs in the service of human commerce or war. I do not think I imagined that from me they averted their heads, politely and with dignity ignoring my existence.

In three days more the plain had paled and sharpened, giving way to limestone and crops of thorny trees. There was a strange tang in the air, a sea promise I did not yet recognize. What they sought by the salt shores I did not know. They were a quiet people. They neither ignored nor made a companion of me. Perhaps because of this gentleness and this protected solitude, or perhaps merely because it was the time for it, my sorrowing began. I can call it nothing else. I did not weep or tear at myself within. A weight was chained to me. It was not even regret, which is fruitless, nor despair, which has necessarily no reason. It was not terrible or unbearable in any way, although it was pain. It lasted three days and two nights. Not until it was past did the other petty miseries steal in. Then I wept.

On the sixth night I ate with Huanhad by the fire, and a woman came and sat with us, holding her child in her arms. I stared at the child across the fire flicker; it was as old as my child would have been, my child which I had abandoned in Ettook’s krarl, to learn his disgusting ways and thoughts and deeds. Never before had there been any sense of loss. Before, always, it had been Vazkor’s, a piece of him, his will imposed on me. I had been glad, glad to be rid of it. And now I saw it differently, for the first time. It had been also a part of me. And more than that, it had been an individual life, a new, a created thing, that I, by the unique laws of nature, had earned a right to participate in. And I had thrust my right away from me, thrown off the wage, confusing it with the hated labor.

I got up from the fire, and walked slowly away among the spiky thorn trees. I clung to them, and cried bitterly in bewildered distress. Yet all the while a cold voice murmured in my brain, It will pass, fool. It will pass. Not for you, at this time.

I fell asleep among the trees, tasting salt on my lips from my tears and from the sea wind, and when I woke, I think I understood that it was my luxury to weep, not my right or even my need. I thought of the warrior he would become, and how he would protect Tathra as his mother from the jeering tribe. I had done well to leave my child with her. And it was easy to give what I did not want.

Yet as I walked through that day toward the unknown sea, all the ghosts and sins of my life came to me and hammered on me. I rode in the Sirkunix, watched Darak die, swung my sword in Vazkor’s battles, shrank from the scarlet water of his death. White horses screamed under me, men fell in my defense with the faces of Maggur, Kel, Mazlek, Slor.

Huanhad came in the sunset and put her hand gently on my arm. I knew enough now to understand almost all of what she said to me.

“What is your trouble, Morda? You walk by yourself, mutter; is this a fever that you have?”

“Yes,” I said, “that is all it is.”

I went into the tent, and lay staring into the shadows until sleep picked me up, and I flew with burning fire-feathered wings across the black cliffs of my doubt.

Below, a great stretch of water crinkled moonlight. I soared above it, and away to the south, saw a shoreline scattered with broken, bone-white cities. I wheeled toward them, the wing-thrust in my ears like a wind-drum, beating with my heart. Over the black bright rollers of the sea, where the froth burst silver on the faces of the dunes and the bastions of crested rocks like the shattered bodies of dragons, eagles, giants.

But out of the white carcass of the cities a shape rose, a man’s shape—Darak? Vazkor? He beat up toward me on black wings, and he grinned as he held wide his arms—not to embrace me but to keep me out. Nearer and nearer—I could see him well now, the plaits of his black hair, the scars on his sunburned skin, the tribal ornaments, the knife in his belt.

“Your son,” he shouted at me across the air which divided us. “Ettook’s warrior! Do you like what you made of me? I have killed forty men, and I have four wives and thirteen sons, and three days from now I will die with an out-tribe spear between my ribs. I might have been a prince in Eshkorek Arnor, or in Ezlann. I might have been a king with a great army at my back, beautiful women to please me, and Power to make all men do as I wished. Do you like what you have made?”

And he drew from his belt a knife, and with one strong beat of the black wings, twisted and threw it. It soared toward me through the darkness.

“This has no ability to kill me,” I said.

But then I saw the knife for what it truly was, or what it had become. The knife from the altar beneath the Mountain—the one blade which could end my life, which Karrakaz had shown me—the Knife of Easy Dying. Its cold tip entered my breast, so sharp I did not feel it. I screamed as it burrowed to the hilt in my flesh.

And found Huanhad’s face and the dawn, instead of death.

2

That day we reached the sea.

Since the marshes, the weather had been strange, drab and dull for summer, yet often very hot. Now, in the afternoon, the skies had a still intense grayness; there was a pre-storm glare on the outlines of the trees. The ground had sloped downward for some while. Rough meadowland stretched away into shadowy valleys. Then ahead, against the gray light, appeared the jutting silhouettes of a cliff range, and beyond that, a faint mauveness like a chalk line on the sky.

Huanhad stopped, pointed, and cried out, “The sea! The sea!”

One or two others joined in her cry, using other words I had not learned yet. It was the first time I had seen them in anything resembling excitement. The children skipped and laughed, and the goats bleated crazily. Qwenex lifted his arm and called us on, and the normal rhythmic walking speed increased to a brisk trot. I hurried with them, but why, I did not fully understand. The smudgy line of color meant nothing to me, and after my dream, there was reluctance besides.

After a few minutes, a guttural roar broke open the cloud sheet. Brazen lightning shot across the open land, and rain fell in large heavy drops, warm on our hands and necks, widely spaced at first, gradually joining together, until we moved through a chain mail of tepid water that beat like a drum on our heads.

Lightning made rose-pink interludes in the sudden darkness. I could not see where we were going, and had an abrupt conviction that we would all run over some cliff edge, like a herd of pigs driven mad.

But they knew the way too well for that. Huanhad firmly grasped my shoulders and brought me to a halt, and I found they had spread out in a line along the cliff top, about a yard from the drop. So I looked down and saw the sea, stretching out and out from the sheer rock strand, two hundred feet below us. On either side the ghosts of other headlands thrust forward to the water, pale in the streaming rain. Ahead, the boiling caldron, seething, limitless, seeming to curve with the round shape of the world, banded with every color of the changing sky, joined to its last perceptible horizon with a thin green lacquer of spume and a hallucination of violet. True beauty is always oddly surprising.

I understood then that I had known the sea before, as my dream should have warned me. I turned my head slowly southward, looking for that scatter of broken bones on this eastern tip of the land. Rain and cliffs were in the way of my eyes. I sensed nothing southward, only empty land, stone beaches, and the carving chisels of the waves. Yet my Power was gone. How could I know?

Huanhad touched my shoulder softly.

“The sea,” she whispered. “You will be better here, Morda.”

After a time, Qwenex called to them, and they turned away, one by one, as if reluctant to let go of the sight of the sea. Through the rain we trudged, parallel to the brink, though a little farther inland. I stumbled over the white limestone outcroppings. We went in a curve and upward, and suddenly there was a white shape ahead, squat, disheveled, and we had reached a broken tower, open to the rain, and breached in a hundred places. Perhaps it had been a watch or beacon in earlier days. It had something of that tower in the marsh where I had first found their krarl.

Swift as its coming, the rain began to ease. In the last drizzling, they formed a circle around the tower’s base, a few feet from it, and stood quite still, as if waiting. A silence fell in place of the rain. Muddied pink lights quivered over the sky. There was something secret, close, mystic even, in the way they stood around the tower. I drew out of their circle, shivered, and waited also.

Qwenex raised his arm, all one black narrow shape against the pale rumbled ruin. He saluted the tower.

And then he moved to one of the broken openings, stooped, and went inside.

A gull screamed furiously, out at sea. There was no other sound.

Qwenex came out of the tower, and in his hands he carried a wooden cask covered with the white powder of the stones that had been laid on top of it. With his knife he prized up the lid. The lid fell off.

Inside, a dull glimmer, something metallic?

He lifted the something out, and it was a great book, covered all over with plated gold. At first, all that stirred in me was the memory of Ezlann, Za, Belhannor, and the books of Asren Javhovor, set with many jewels, glittering and priceless in the candlelight. Qwenex carried the book forward and went around the circle to each of them in turn, and each man, woman, child, touched the book, very lightly, as if it were too hot or cold for them. I remembered then what Uasti, the healer of the wagons, had told me—of the wandering tribe and the golden book that contained legends of the Lost Race. My heart sprang against my ribs. I reached across the circle, and laid my hand full on the surface of the golden book. Qwenex looked at me. He let me touch the holy thing, but he would not let me do more. This much I could see.

What had Uasti said? No woman was allowed to look inside it. Yet I felt the inscription, blurred by age and handling, seek my palm like a moving snake. I lifted my hand, and saw the words as I had seen them written in the green dust on the wagon floor.

BETHEZ-TE-AM, Herein the Truth.

Then Qwenex was moving away from me, carrying the book to others, waiting motionless and yearning.

I shuddered, and before I could stop myself, I laughed. They did not seem to notice what I did. They, the black peaceful ones from the marshlands, who carried the sin and sorrow of what had created me, who worshiped the annals of hubris and stupidity; the annals that were perhaps the key to what I must know of myself, to my lost Power—even the location of the green comfort, my soul-kin, the Jade.

A huge vermilion gong rapidly sinking over the inland meadows was the first and last we saw of that day’s sun. Their black tents were up between the sea and the tower, and along the flinty scrubland behind it. Their cook-fires sizzled and popped and hiccuped smutty protests in the wet grass. They went about their ordinary tasks as I had seen them do every evening since I had been with them, yet I had been with them long enough to know that there was a different feel to what they did. The women talked more than usual, the men less. The children ran about and rolled in the meadows, where the goats nibbled and stared around them with bright mad eyes, catching the anticipation that tingled in the air. Some ceremony or feast or rite was to come with the full darkness. Some rejoicing which had to do with the sea, and the ancient book.

The Book. I was obsessed with it. It lay now in Qwenex’s tent, and a circle of warriors stood around the tent, guarding it. It was more tradition than anything, that guard; who of the tribe, after all, would interrupt the Book’s privacy? Yet I could not break through the chain of spears and men. I prowled about the camp, not eating or drinking, going from fire to fire, trying to catch up snatches of their talk and understand them. I learned nothing.

An oval moon pierced through the cloud, and the sea under it burned white from edge to edge. The breakers exploded below us with soft concussions.

Their meal was finished. The women laughed and shook their hair in the dusk. A string of children came running from the goat fields with armfuls of small pale flowers. They tossed them down, and I saw countless garlands lying on the grass. The women bent and put the flowers around their heads, and on the heads of their men. Something in me grew tight and afraid, and I drew back from them along the cliff. I had seen too many ceremonies, obscure, hateful, and empty, to welcome this one. Huanhad came picking her way toward me, a warrior walking a little behind her, both of them garlanded. She held out flowers to me also.

“You are not of us,” she said slowly, so that I should understand, “but you are welcome to be glad with us if you wish.”

My hand stayed stiffly by my side, but I thought of the Book. I reached out and took the flowers, put them on my hair, and thanked her. They turned and went back into the camp, and I followed them.

They had laid a new fire in the meadowland, a little way behind the tower, and now they were forming around the lank red banners of its smoky flames in their repetitive circle, linking hands. A tall boy, fifteen years old, perhaps, began to play on a long narrow pipe made from the tough stem of some reed. A strange thin sound came from the pipe, not in any sense a melody. The circle began to sway one way and then the other. Huanhad, her warrior, and I slid into the circle. Hands disengaged to receive us, clasped again around our own. Caught now in the swaying motion they made, the fire slid before my eyes, the reed-wailing made a jumble of my thoughts and senses. The circle began to flow leftward and around the fire, trotting at first, soon running. I saw the blur of faces beyond the flames. Feet thudded softly over the crackle of damp twigs, the sea-thunder below. Suddenly a man’s voice cried out behind the circle. The chain broke, hands dropped hands, the men, women, and children fell away from the fire, and ran instead, forward, after the boy with the pipe, and Qwenex, who carried in his hands once more the golden Book.

The moon blazed coldly overhead, and against the still-blue sky, I saw the thin ebony lines of the running figures, stringing out like the scattered notes from the pipe, their hair flying under the silver sprinkle of summer flowers.

I did not know where they were going, nor what significance this thing had to them. I followed blindly, without their ecstasy, tearing my way through tall grasses and staggering across sharp stones. A long time seemed to pass, and my breath came short, and hurt under my breast. I was afraid I would lose them—I was already the last, and far behind. Panting, I clambered over white rocks, looked up and saw that they had gone. I stared out along the cliff line, but they were no longer ahead of me. I held my breath and listened for the pipe, but it was silent. They might have vanished off the earth.

And then I thought to look down, over the cliff edge, and I saw the breakers were pounding far out now, leaving a long stretch of open beach. On the beach lay the tribe, like people resting after a hard journey, on their backs, hand touching hand, quite still, describing once more, by some curious intuition of their bodies, that circle which expresses infinity for it has neither beginning nor end. For a moment I thought they had flung themselves down there from the cliff to die, and then, in the center of them, I saw the hub of the wheel, picked out by the moon, which was the Book.

I scrambled across the rocks, searching out their way down. When I found it, it was a treacherous limestone slide, broken by natural terraces. I dared it, clinging to handholds of gorse and long grass, and pebbles rattled away from me to the beach far below. Bruised and torn, I landed on the last stretch where the stone gave way to sand. I crept around the bastion of the cliff, picked a path beside its green-stained underside. They did not seem to hear me, and again I wondered if they were dead. When I was nearer, however, I saw them breathe, though their eyes were closed, their faces trancelike. I touched the shoulder of a woman, and she did not stir. I jumped across her body, and was inside the circle.

Sand splayed up from my feet. I looked at them, and they did not wake. I had again that feeling of a wild animal, an unthinking thing. I had profaned some secret holiness of theirs, but in my own need I did not care.

I ran and kneeled by the Book. My eyes dazzled with black darts of excitement. I flung open the cover.

I cried out. I turned the pages, one after the other, in a frenzy. I could not believe what I saw, would not believe it. For the pages of the Book were blank.

Oh, yes, there had been writing, this much I could see, but the inks had faded. Now there were only faint smudges and marks here and there on the yellowness. And I could tell nothing from them.

I rocked my body, still kneeling by the Book, staring out at the black retreating sea.

I had realized quickly that this tribe was not the tribe Uasti had spoken of, the hill tribe of healers who had trained her. I had reasoned then that this book was not the one she had told me of but another, perhaps a copy, or even a different thing. Yet it bore the same name, was revered; it must be some relic of the Lost—some clue for me. I had hoped. And there was nothing here after all.

I got to my feet, leaving the Book open, the night breeze faintly riffling the empty pages. I jumped clear of the circle, and began to walk southward, up the beach. If not the Book, then the broken ruins of the cities. They at least must be here, for where else had the tribe discovered their relic?

I was tired, walking with my eyes half closed and my feet dragging. At the edge of the sea I left my footprints, the lace fans cold on my skin, smelling the ancient fish smell of the water. Sand gave way to pebble, and then again to altered, muddier sand. I threw my garland to the sea, and watched the waves carry it off, then bring it back to me.

It came to me, as I walked, how bitter the irony of the Book had been which had said: Herein the Truth.

For it had a truth of its own in its bleached barrenness. What was truth except something which faded, lost its shape, grew unreadable and indistinguishable, at last a blank page for men to write on what they wished.

All pebbles and chunks of the white stone now underfoot. The night was sliding down behind the land on ruffled wings, and the bitter cold of the sea-dawn fastened on me. Most of the night I had walked under the towering giant’s pottery of cliffs, while the tide drew in and out, breathing. Once I had climbed to a higher place, out of the water’s reach, and slept there until the new silence of the waves slipping away again woke me, and I went on. I was hemmed in between the long flat water and the high irregular stoneworks.

A marigold sun rose from the sea, seeming to drip back its color into the silver breakers. Seabirds wheeled and cried.

I rounded yet another cliff face, and found it was the last. Before me lay a wide and open sandy bay, scooped back to the terraces of low hills. Beyond the bay, far off, half painted on the morning mist, a tongue of land that poked out many miles into the water. At first I did not see the white shapes scattered across the hills of the bay and the tongue of land. But the sun pointed with a chilly orange finger, and I realized I had found my dream’s cities with the dawn.

I walked into the cold water of the bay, following the curve of it, yet not going any closer. A kind of extra sense, all that was left to me of my Power, told me that this place was very old, older than Ezlann, the Dark City, older even than Kee-ool, and not only ancient, but unlived-in, unvisited. Some atmospheric barrier surrounded it that kept men away The far-off ancestors of the black tribe had come once—and they had found the Book. Perhaps others had come—briefly, yet never staying long enough to leave any imprint on the cold stones. And whoever had come and gone, the cities had forgotten them.

I thought of those cities of Sea’s Edge in the far south, that last alliance Vazkor had planned to conquer.

Had they also fallen into decay? Would his armies, if they had come there, have met with another such ancient indifference?

A sound broke harsh behind me, making me spin, wide eyed, to see what demon-guardian the ruins had woken against me.

Three tall black men stood waiting in the surf, the wind lifting their long hair, spears in their right hands, knives at their narrow hips. Their leader, the tallest, spoke again:

“To men and women of our krarl comes the need, sometimes, to seek this place. All who feel such need come here. Was there such a need in you?”

“Yes,” I said, “and a need to be alone here, too.”

“Not good to be alone here,” the warrior said gently. “There are strange things in the cities by day, and stranger things, with the night.”

The cold wind nicked my skin. I shivered.

“I am Fethlin,” he said.

“I am Wexl,” “I, Peyuan,” the second and third men said.

Again the magic number of three had repeated itself—my guard, once more, stood waiting to serve me, having followed me through the night—and I had not even sensed their presence. But this time I did not want this security. No more men should die for me like fools.

“Go back,” I said. “Go back to Qwenex and your people. I profaned your trance-circle on the beach. I opened the golden Book—I broke the hearth-bond and the guest-promise of your krarl. Spit on me, and go back.”

Fethlin looked at me, and he said, “That was your need.”

“You know nothing of my need,” I shouted at him. “Go back—go away—I will have no more butchered lives strung around my neck!”

I stopped shouting, and the wind filled the silence, as it had filled all the silences in this bay for thousands of years.

“If you enter the city, we will follow you,” Fethlin said. “That is how it must be. Your need is our need.

Only our own gods understand why.”

There seemed something completely final in that they had recognized, as Maggur and his would not, as Mazlek and his only partly would, that they were bound to me by some motiveless and insane unnatural law.

“Very well, then,” I said. “None of us has a choice. I am sorry, for you will die.”

I turned my back, and began to walk inland toward the curved scoop of the bay, ignoring that they came after me.

3

Farther south, a causeway led from the sea, rising clear of the beach. Perhaps there had been a harbor there, and a watch beacon; nothing remained. Beyond the sand a grassy slope, tangled with tough dark green trees, and, climbing up between these, I found the first ruin of a road, once forty, fifty feet across, set with those great slabs I remembered from the Lforn Kl Javhovor; there was not much left of it now.

Paving had been heaved aside by growing things. Lichens and weeds wove together like a tapestry, a pall to cover something dead.

Then there was a green open stretch where the road lost itself entirely and reappeared twenty feet away, dividing a broken wall, flanked on either side by the bases of pillars. They had been very tall once, now they seemed like the melted-down stubs of candles. When I reached them, I put out my hands to touch the blurred carving. Nothing stirred inside me or around me. Yet this had been a phoenix gate, long ago.

When I went through it, and stood inside the city, I had to glance back quickly. Behind the figures of the warriors I saw the sea’s pale glitter still moving in the bay. I turned, and went on over the green and white patchwork paving, between the open foundations which were all that remained. A few cracked marble obelisks leaned toward the hills, as if undecided whether to fall now or to wait a few centuries longer.

The strange howling winds which live in deserted places blew through the wreckage of palace walls.

The sun rose higher, and the sky was a brittle uncertain blue. It was noon, and I had passed through many gates, across many ruined roads. They had become one and the same to me. We were higher into the terraced hills, the sea behind us, remotely turquoise. Here, between buildings, a tree had thrust itself. I sat down beneath it, staring out across the empty plaza.

Fethlin, Wexl and Peyuan crouched a few feet from me, shared a small meal of goat cheese and dried dates. I refused the food they offered, but took a sip or two from the waterskin Fethlin carried.

The ruins made me ill at ease, I needed to move on, despite my tiredness, yet I did not know where to go, nor what I must look for. Though the wind still blew hard, it was warmer. I shut my eyes, leaning against the tree. I was dozing, slipping into sleep, when suddenly the green spear opened my brain. I started awake, and in that moment, felt the Pull, strong as I had felt it on the plain before Ezlann. I got to my feet and stood still, trying it, as a dog sniffs out a faintly remembered scent.

There was a little side street, flanked by a few solitary standing walls, leading southward out of the plaza.

I walked toward it, and into it, and down it, and heard the sounds of Fethlin and the other two, rising and coming after me. In a while, the Pull became so strong I began to run. One of my black shadows ran beside me, three others behind me. The street vanished in among trees. And beyond their dark moist shade, the land fell abruptly away and downward. I stopped, finding I was looking out across a small valley, hidden by the terraced hills from the beach, and the cliffs.

A flight of steps had been cut in the hill, now as green as the hill, leading down. The valley was also green, and almost empty. A few white stones lay on their sides like sheep, strayed into an enchanted place and petrified.

At the far end of the valley rested a cloud of fir trees, and out of this cloud appeared the hand of a giant, with one long finger pointing up, toward the sky.

Behind me, Wexl uttered an unknown hushed word, perhaps the name of a god.

But the hand was stone, like everything else, though not quite like, for the color was warmer—a harder building stuff, which had lasted longer. There was a ring at the middle joint of the finger-tower, which seemed to be a great balcony circling it. There were still bits of gold in the ring; they caught the sun and glittered yellow-white.

I began to go down the overgrown stairway, and at once I was cold. I thought the three warriors might not come with me, but they did.

Near the valley floor shrubs had grown over the steps, and they hacked a way for me with their knives.

The grass in the valley was like velvet under my feet, but nearer the building it grew coarser and longer, and there were purple flowers with thorny stems. I looked back several times beyond the warriors. The valley was very still.

I turned my foot on a peculiarly smooth stone, and again, a few feet later, on another. I think I looked down because they had not really the feel of stones at all, and saw a skull lying in the grass, polished and brown from age. I was careful where I put my feet after that, but I saw others, and bones besides.

In the icy shadows of the firs lay the skeletons of three large dogs, or even wolves, perhaps.

Something about the bones terrified me. Yet the cold tingling of my spine and neck, the desire to look over my shoulder, had become so much a part of me that I was almost able to ignore them.

Tree shadows sprayed across the base of the hand, on the intricate stonework and carving which represented a bracelet. Facing me, set like a jewel in the bracelet, was an oval dark door which seemed to be made of onyx. There was no marking on the door, no indication of a way in. Across the threshold something lay staring at us with black sockets.

“The Guardian,” Fethlin said softly.

The skeleton was fully clothed in an ancient decayed armor, a cloak from which all color had faded, a helm with a long crumbled plume. A sword rested on its bone thigh, vivid with rust. It was strange, for the flowers and grass which had overgrown all the rest had not touched him.

The dread I felt then, I realized, did not come from me, but from the place, and from some long ago atmosphere laid on it by a curse or a Power.

“No farther,” I said to Fethlin. “I must go in alone, if there is a way in.”

They did not argue with me, and I forced myself forward to the oval door. I stooped over the dead sentry, and touched his armored chest with my fingers.

“Peace, old one,” I said. I was not sure why I said it, but the words seemed to come into my mouth. “I mean no harm, and I have a right to walk here. Know me, and let me by.”

There was no lessening of the cold or terror, but I went past, going around him, and not stepping over, and when I put my hand on the oval door, there came the snap of a lock, and it opened inward in front of me.

I do not know what I expected, I suppose, the worst or the best that could come to me. Certainly nothing so ordinary as the round white room. I went into it and the door flew shut behind me. I felt no particular panic, for somehow I had known it would. With the shutting of the door, the room grew darker, yet not totally dark. Light came, not from windows but from the well above where a stairway led upward into the tower.

On the walls there were faint shapes, the ghosts of pictures. I could make nothing of them. I needed my lost sight—that sight which could make out the engraved words on the High-Lord’s way, so blurred and faded no other could tell what they were. I left the walls and went toward the stairway of white marble.

On the first step a second skeleton-warrior sat grinning at me.

“To you, also, peace,” I whispered. Eyes seemed to move far back in the sockets, the hideous mouth laughed. I went around him and up the stairs.

On the first level there was nothing, only replicas of the faded walls, and the light was stronger. At the second level the wind blew in coldly on my face. Five oval open doorways pierced the walls of the room.

I crossed the marble floor, and emerged from one of them on the ring-balcony of the finger tower. The balustrade was very high, its carved head a foot above my own. Only tall men or women could have looked out over the ring, across the green valley. To me, only the sky showed itself, hard and icy blue, and the tips of the hills beneath it. I moved around the balcony slowly. The floor was laid with colored stones, red and brown and green and gold, the same as in the ruined theater at Kee-ool, yet the pattern was more intricate, almost mathematical. I moved round and round the balcony, my eyes on the colored paving. Round and round. It came to me, dreamily, that I might walk here forever, round and round, until I died. Yet the paving held such a variety of vistas, it did not seem I crossed the same space, but over water and treetops, and the red sands of some other world. ...

A gull, flying inland, saved me. It shrieked high above the tower, as if to warn me, perhaps in its own fear of the valley. I came to my senses, ran in at an oval door, and stood in the pale room, panting. Fool!

Surely I had known there would be magic in this place, and traps to catch every brain and will. Had I forgotten already the brown bones in the grass?

The stairs still led up, this time away from the daylight. I went to them and began to climb. Black marble here, and darkness. And narrowness. My dreams came back swiftly to me now, those dreams I had lost in Ezlann. The white marble leading to the black, and then—

I screamed in irresistible, brief fright. In the dark I had come face to face, breast to breast, with a third sentry. Unlike the other two, he stood upright, balanced in some inexplicable way across the oval door-mouth at which the stairs ended. There seemed no way past.

“Peace, old one; know me and let me by,” I said.

We stood facing each other, and he towered over me, glaring down from the pits of the skull. And then anger came to me, fierce and sudden.

“Let me by,” I hissed at the thing, as if it were some soldier and I the cat-goddess of White Desert, and when the skeleton stayed in its place, I struck out at it with my hand. It tottered, and tumbled by me down the stairs, rattling. At the bottom, the hard marble cracked the helmed skull free of the spine, and it rolled away, out of my sight. To the clammy persistent terror, a new terror was added then. I knew the superstitious worth of all guardians—those men set to guard till death and beyond it the hallowed places of vanished peoples. Still, it was done now, and for a purpose. I went through the doorway into the last room of the tower.

There was a source of light in the darkness. It flickered and flared up, and many different colors played over the three painted walls. I had no time to spare for the light, for the paintings took my whole attention—they were clear and unfaded, and very, very old, and my whole body trembled when I looked at them.

On one wall there was the painting of a black mountain.

Over it a purple cloud rested, and under it a woman lay asleep. Her body was very white and her hair was also white; she had no face. Instead, there was a piece of jade set into the stone. On the second wall, this jade-faced woman was shown again, dressed in a green robe that left bare breasts and arms.

She carried in one hand a golden whip, in the other a silver rod. Behind her, three warriors, dressed as the skeletons had been, in golden armor and green cloth, green plumes trailing from their helms. They bore no resemblance that I could see to Maggur, Giltt, or Kel; Mazlek, Slor, or Dnarl; Fethlin, Wexl, or Peyuan. On the third wall the woman stood for the last time, behind her the symbol of a sinking bloody sun, and in her two hands a knife I remembered well—the Knife of Easy Dying, its sharp point directed at her breast.

I would not look at it. I turned to the fourth wall, over which a long curtain was hanging. I reached for it, and tore it down, and beyond it there was a wide golden couch, and on it a white-skinned woman in a green robe, her hair plaited with gold and pieces of jade, with a veil of gauze across her face. I did not know if she were statue or embalmed thing, but I knew now well enough what place I had entered. It was a tomb. And the tomb was mine.

My impulse was to fall to my knees, to whimper with fear, but one last curiosity drove me on. I leaned across the creature, which could so easily be me, and I pulled the gauze away.

No, this was not my body, after all. I stared down at her a long while. A carving of something beautiful, yet no words had ever come from the pale mouth, no brain had ever woken behind the wide forehead.

Her closed eyelids were like two green leaves that had fallen on the sleeping face.

“You forget,” I said to the room, “you forget what I am. You forget that I have been made to know myself.”

And I turned.

I understood then what had given me light to see all these things. On a block of stone, a smooth stone basin, and in it a bright flame leaped and burned. The voice began as no more than a whispering. I would have shut it out.

“So—So—So—”

“Be still,” I said. “Be still.”

I began to edge around the walls toward the stair shaft.

“So. Ahhh! So—So Karrakaz enorr—” sizzled the no-voice in my brain. I had never heard such power in it, such electric triumph. “I am Karrakaz the Soulless One. I—I—I—”

“No!” I shouted. “You are nothing.”

“I am I—I remember. I remember our bargain at the place men call Kee-ool—and that we did not keep it. But all that is dust now. I remember the wagoners on the road to the Dark City, and the Chief Priest, and the battle before Belhannor. You have fed me well. Lie down now, and die. You have done much.”

I could not seem to reach the stairway. My limbs were lead, dragging me down. I began to crawl on my belly, pulling myself forward with my hands clamped to the slippery floor.

“Die,” whispered the voice. “Sleep-death. Silence. Peace. Die,” whispered the voice. “Only pain in the world, and trouble, and misery. Sleep.”

My hands were on the oval door-mouth. The marble burned and blistered them. A web seemed to hang across the opening. I pushed my head very slowly outward, and through the web, and it hurt very much. I could no longer feel my body, only my face and my hands.

“Fethlin!” I called, and knew he would never hear me.

“Do not call,” the voice whispered. “You have no other needs. Only sleep.”

“Fethlin!” I cried, and my voice came stronger, and cracked itself against the marble walls. Scarlet pain splintered my spine. “Fethlin!” I screamed. The scream was huge and terrible. It seemed to rock the tower to its base. Far below I heard the crash of the onyx door thrown wide, though how they opened it I could not tell.

“Better to die,” crooned the voice.

There were running feet on the marble stairs. I tried to pull myself down the steps toward them, and could not. A colored lightning split the room behind me. Nearer and nearer the running feet—a dark shadow moved upward toward me.

“Death comes,” said the voice.

I thought I saw then the trick it had played on me, the he-she thing in the stone. I struck out blindly and wildly at the assassin on the stairs, but he caught my hands, and, after a moment, I knew that it was Fethlin after all.

He dragged me clear of the doorway, and ran with me down the steps, holding me up by a grip around my waist, while my numb feet tried to make running motions and failed. I sensed and answered to his urgency, but did not understand why. In the last hall Wexl waited, and Peyuan held open the door.

We fled out of that place, Wexl and Peyuan holding me now by the arms. My feet touched the grass, and a little sensation came back to them. They were running. The ground spun by beneath me, the sky overhead. And the sky was black with storm. Out of the shadow of the fir trees, into the open valley. I found my feet and legs. I began to run. The air hummed around us.

Suddenly the world tipped sideways. We were flung down into the cruel grasses, among the thorns and skulls. We scrambled to our feet, and struggled on again until the next shock overtook us. The valley grass rippled without wind. We had reached the lower steps of the hill. Shrubbery clawed out and caught at clothing, hair, skin. The earth drummed angrily.

I crawled and clutched and tore my frantic way up the hill, my face to the greenness, unseeing. When the thunder came, I thought it was the end for us, but the quake was spent. Lightning washed across the sky.

Fethlin laid his hand on my shoulder, and I turned and saw that the valley was still, secretive, poised once more in its deathly enchantment.

“I led you into an evil place,” I said. “I am sorry.”

We reached the summit of the hill, and Fethlin looked upward at the thunderclouds.

“Did you find what you sought?” Wexl asked me.

“No,” I said, “not what I sought. There is no answer for me here, after all.”

I stood still and empty. I could think of nothing, no solution or hope. What was there for me now? My life had been a meaningless journey indeed. I stared back at the valley. Perhaps I had been wrong to call for help. It would have been easy to lie down beside my other self, and give myself up to the dark.

“We must find shelter,” Fethlin said. “Sunset is near, and the storm may mask it. We cannot reach the sea before the night comes.”

I glanced at their faces. I could tell they were not afraid, yet their looks were set and stern with unease.

They did not trust the ruined cities by night.

No rain had come with the storm, yet a twilight chill settled as we followed Fethlin over the boulders and the broken walls. The thunder folded itself away into the sea, leaving an immense silence.

4

Darkness gathered. In the hiding place Fethlin had found us—a tiny sunken room, still roofed over, and with a low narrow door-mouth—we crouched around our little fire. Wexl and Peyuan had piled loose stones against the door, now only a small hole remained. The room became very smoky, and even so the orange warmth of the fire leaked away. I did not know what it was we hid from, neither, I think, did they.

Old tales and older instinct had combined to make them wary.

They ate oatcake and cheese, and Fethlin set a watch—himself first, Wexl second, and Peyuan last, through the hours of the night. I was not included, whether out of politeness, or because he thought me incapable, I am not sure. I did not argue the point. I curled myself into a corner where a stubborn bush was growing, and slept wearily, not even caring what dreams or memories came.

But it seemed at first an empty, quiet sleep. Once I woke, and saw that Wexl had replaced Fethlin by the door hole.

The second time I woke, things were very different. Wexl was no longer at his post, and beyond the fire were no longer stretched the sleeping shapes of Fethlin and Peyuan. The fire itself was out, yet I was aware of a great glow in the blackness beyond the door.

I stood up and went to the door, and found I could move out of it standing upright. Beyond the shelter, streets of tall buildings stretched away, steps led up and down, obelisks stood straight as spear shafts. I knew then that I dreamed, for this was the city as it had been, not as it had become, and its sisters with it in the terraced hills. Yet there were no lights in any of the palaces, no lanterns swung from poles, no colored lamps went by in the hands of men. Only that great harsh glare that flared eastward, out toward the sea, an unwholesome red beacon of some disaster. I walked out into the city streets, under the shadow of the old walls. I climbed higher and higher into the hills until at last I could look down and see that huge torch burning on the tongue of land that ran out from the beach. There was some movement around it, a dismal mechanical movement. Occasionally the flames would leap very high, and magenta smoke clouds would funnel into the sky. The sea glittered bloodily across the bay.

A dreadful certainty came on me that I would be trapped by my dream in the old world with its miasma of calamity. I made that supreme effort, so like the thrust of a swimmer up from some river’s muddy bottom, and my head broke the surface of the dream, and I woke.

At once Wexl’s hand grasped my arm.

“Make no sound,” he whispered. “There is some danger.”

I nodded and he let me go. I sat up. The little fire had been darkened by a heap of loose soil. Fethlin and Peyuan were kneeling by the door hole, staring out, looking this way and that.

Then the noise came, from somewhere outside the shelter. My skin became icy, and my hair prickled.

Never had I heard such a noise. Not knowing even what it was, I became sick with fear and loathing. A sort of slithering rustle that seemed like the movement of dry old flesh, dragged inch by flacid inch over the grassy paving of the street. The first thing that came to my mind was that some huge snake was pulling itself around our hiding place. I had never seen these great serpents in the wild, but I had heard the bandits, and later the wagoners, tell stories of them, and remembered the creature the woman had danced with in Ankurum, as wide as her waist and twenty feet long, or more. Despite their terrifying size, they did not eat man, but preferred smaller juicier morsels, such as unlucky hedgehogs. But then the sound came again, and there was something in it that made me certain it was more than a snake; it was too large, and there was nothing sinuous in it, none of the grace of the serpent. And it was coming closer.

I crawled to the door hole and looked out.

Between the broken walls, something came. It stood in the street, flexing its body, turning its head, twitching the long tail backward and forward, with a sound of dry, old flesh scraping on stone.

I had heard of dragons. Now I saw one. Though it was not a true dragon, I realized, when I had begun to reason again.

After I had crossed Aluthmis, I saw the three girls dance in the chiefs hall, and the object of their dance had been the great lizard, large as a wolf, a mutation of its kind. I had thought that horrible and curious enough. Now I saw that Change was not finished with its experiment in size. I told myself that the thing in the street was only a lizard, yet it was hard for me. No wolf-sized creature this. It towered high above the walls, its broad flat head was the length of a man’s body, its tapering thrashing tail as thick as four men roped together. The faintest hint of starlight picked out the dry, rustling, black cascade of its scales; its whole body was armored. In its long mouth were well-developed teeth, and a long, black, whiplike tongue. Its enormous eyes turned on their incredible axis, each one a different way. It heaved itself upward on its stumpy legs and came toward us.

Silently, stiffly, we drew back from the hole. But I think there was still a hope in us that it did not know we were there.

Through the chink of the hole we watched the ghastly head lower itself, slide toward the opening, and stop short. It made another sound now, a hissing spitting noise of anger, and the stench of its breath filled up the room, a stink of death, and foulness, and everything decayed. We had flattened ourselves against the walls, and as well we had. The long tongue darted, and flashed in through the doorway at us, large as a snake in itself, blindly questing about the tiny space in spasm. It was how a smaller lizard would catch flies.

None of us thought to strike at the tongue as we stood congealed against the walls. In another moment it was with drawn. And almost immediately a frantic scrabbling began outside as it started to paw its way in to us.

“We will be killed, Fethlin,” I said, “if we stay here.” I made no effort to keep my voice low; there was no longer any point.

“The roof will fall soon,” he answered. As if to emphasize his words, an avalanche of stones rushed and rattled outside.

“Or it will open the doorway wide enough to see where it thrusts its tongue,” Wexl muttered.

A slab thudded from over our heads and exploded in the street. I felt sick, but a thought came to me.

“There is no moon,” I said, “and the thing has slept by day. Perhaps it is afraid of the light. When it came you doused the fire.”

“True.” Fethlin drew the flint from his belt. He leaned and struck flame from a stone, and shook the flame off into the heaped-up fire. A twig snapped alive. “Our only chance,” Fethlin said. “If light keeps it back from us, then we must run toward the beach; we do not have enough kindling to last the night. It will follow, no doubt, but I do not think such a thing likes salt water, either.”

We pushed the soil off the fire and threw on further branches snapped from the bush in the corner.

Peyuan cracked loose four of the sturdiest limbs and gave us one each to dip and use as torches. Outside the thing gave a snuffling cough as smoke irritated its hungry, merciless throat. A rush of red flame came suddenly, lighting up the door hole, and the lizard hissed. We heard its awkward flight backward, the crunching as its great paws crushed pebbles. Wexl and Peyuan thrust the stones out of the door-mouth; Fethlin flung the burning stuff after them. The spitting branches in our hands, we burst from cover. I had one glimpse of it, cowering back, yet only a few feet from us, its eyes half-blinded, and saliva gushing a poisonous yellow from its jaws. Then we had turned and were running hard and silent through those streets of white bones, making for the sea.

It followed us. We had known that it must. We saw the sea below, and heard its rustling, unstoppable progress behind us. We found the road and the trees, and by this time our branches had guttered out in our grasp, extinguished by the damp wind from the bay. There was no time to stop and make new fire among the trees, and no scattered branches ready to hand. But there seemed to be fire enough in my lungs.

We stumbled out onto the beach. It was very wide and gray under the overcast sky. The sea lay a long way out, ink-black, whispering.

Peyuan took my arm, and hurried my flagging body forward.

“Only a little way,” he panted.

“Peyuan—I do not think I can swim—”

And then the sound came in the sand behind us, unexpectedly immediate.

We had the sense to break free of each other, and each run to opposite sides, but one paw glanced across Peyuan’s neck, and he fell and rolled a little way, and was still. I thought of the third warrior I had pushed aside in the tower, and how his skull had snapped from the spine. I could not think how it had come on us so quickly, but I suppose I had dropped behind, and the beach was an open place for it to cross, with no obstacles in the way. Now it spat, and lurched sideways after Peyuan’s body. I found a stone by my foot, and reached, and threw it at the lizard. Its armor deflected the stone, but it turned back, and its eyes fell on me. I did not understand why I had done such a thing. Peyuan was dead—I could not help him. Why had I not left him, and run for the sanctuary of the water?

A shout came from my left, and Fethlin ran back up the beach. The monster turned yet again, once more distracted. Wexl leaped on my right with a high hooting wail. He flung sand up at the lizard, and ran around it waving his arms. Stupidly the terrible head swerved to follow him.

It became a grotesque game. Dancing and shrieking we ran, with an energy gouged from our weariness, in circles around the lizard, edging always nearer to the sea, safe while it could not decide which of us to strike at first. But my head swam, and my legs could scarcely carry me. I did not think I should reach the sea.

We made a great deal of noise, and the monster hissed at us venomously; I am not certain when I first became aware of that other sound. High, steady, a throbbing whine almost beyond the pitch of my ears. I thought at first it was only the quick prelude to the faintness which would finish me. And then the Shadow fell over us all.

It lay across the sand, containing us, a vast oval of blackness, and we responded to it with an automatic fear of the unknown thing which beats down from the sky-lands where men cannot go. We drew back, not even daring to look up at whatever hung there, our eyes riveted on its earthbound manifestation. Only the lizard remained unmoved. It started after us, spit flying from its hissing jaws. In that moment, a thin line of white fire struck down and covered it, blinding us. And when we could see again, a pile of smoking stinking stuff lay where the lizard had been, and the sand was black dust.

I had heard them tell stories, in camp and krarl and village, of the gods, and the bolt which a god casts that burns and destroys. I fell to my knees, but my head tilted back on its own, and I looked full at the gliding, thrumming silver thing which hovered a moment more, high above the beach, then dipped sideways and southward, and vanished beyond the far line of cliffs that marked the bay, leaving a thread of golden fire behind it on the darkness.

5

After such a thing has happened, men find they cannot speak to each other of it. It is too alien and too immense to be grasped, it has no place in the world of normal things, therefore they make no place for it.

The stuff of legends had touched us, and we said nothing.

We got up, and walked back to where Peyuan’s body was lying. Wexl leaned over him, and gently rolled him onto his back. Peyuan’s eyes opened.

“Did you kill the beast?” he asked.

“It is dead,” Fethlin said truthfully.

Peyuan grinned and Wexl helped him up. Peyuan shook sand from himself.

“Now you will not have to swim, Morda.”

I could hardly believe that he was alive. I had seen Giltt die, and Dnarl die. I could hardly believe. I went to him and touched his shoulder, and he grinned all the more.

“Yes, I live.” He laughed, and he hugged me to him. “A miracle, a god-gift.”

We walked back up the beach together, found branches among the trees, now that the need was no longer urgent, and built a fire. There was a warmer feel to the night and no sense of danger, yet Fethlin set his sentries anyway.

The predawn coldness woke me. A gray light was opening over the sea, and against it Peyuan patrolled up and down before the trees, trying to keep himself awake. I rose, and picked my way softly by the fire.

“Peyuan,” I said, “I will take your watch.”

“No, no, I wait to see the sun rise.” He yawned convulsively.

“You took the lizard’s blow that should have fallen on me,” I said. “I at least can take your last hour here.”

After a little arguing, he went to the fire and lay down, and fell instantly asleep.

So I saw the sun come up again over the long sea.

And I thought many things. I thought how rarely, since I had come from the Mountain, had I turned back into my past. Events divided each section of my life, and now the ruins, the lizard, and the great Shadow had divided it yet once more. I could not now return to Qwenex’s people. I must go onward into the unknown places yet again. I turned and looked at the three sleeping warriors, and I thought how Peyuan lived. I wondered then if he had lived because I had at first rejected them, when before always I had welcomed the three guard who came to me, as my protection and my right. I understood what I must do.

The sun was full in the sky, and soon they would wake. There were no dangers on the beach now that the day had come there. So I turned my back, and I ran down toward the sea and lost my footprints in its chilly advancing foam. Southward then. Behind me the tongue of land where I had seen the sick redness of the fire in my dream; ahead the far cliffs at the end of the bay.

By noon I was past those far cliffs, and there were no more cities.

The day grew hot, the sky hard and blue. I left the warm sand in the afternoon, having found a way up from the beach. On the headland spreading trees clustered, and waist-high ferns wove around their trunks. It was an uninhabited place, run wild, full of strange bright flowers and the calls of birds. I wandered through it, keeping the sea on my left hand as a guide.

Sunset stained scarlet, purple, green, between the branches, and the trees were thinner. I could see ahead an open place between them, a wide comparatively bare valley set into the woods, and I became aware that the sounds of the woods and the cries of the birds had stopped. I hesitated, listening. All around me was the silence of fear, yet I felt nothing at all. Cautiously I went on, and the quiet seemed to grow more and more intense. Uneasily I stopped again, and listened, and this time I heard a new sound, felt rather than heard, a high thin drumming in the air that made me want to shake my head to clear it.

Step by step now, linking my body to each tree and shadow, I edged to the brink of the valley, and, looking out, I saw what I expected to see there.

Asutoo had spoken to me long ago of the silver sky chariots of the gods, which sometimes rode to earth, and in Ankurum and later in the mountains of Eshkorek, I had looked up and seen the stars which moved, burning, across the dark. But I remembered now the falling star I had seen when I rode to Barak’s camp in the hills—the star with a trail of golden fire, which seemed to come down in the plains beyond. What had passed above us on the beach also issued a trail of flame. Perhaps in my unconscious self I had equated those two consciously unrecognized facts; perhaps I had followed deliberately, with the stupid fascinated curiosity of all breathing things, the fall of this brightest, closest star.

Its silver oval rested in the valley, seeming to pulse and tremble with impossible light, and around it the grass was blackened.

Last sunlight dropped red flakes across the trunks, as I moved out beyond the trees.

1

Indigo night colors filled the valley and the woods, but the light of the great star remained, pale, and very bright. I had crawled a way to a stand of the wild trees grouped about a hundred feet from the thing; I sat in their shadow, staring out at it, almost mesmerized. I could not go any nearer, for there was no more cover, and I could not go back because ... All reasoning seemed suspended. As on the beach, this was so alien to me, made so little sense in my world, that when I sat before it, nothing else seemed believable either. I had thought at first perhaps it was the star which lived, but after a while a piece of the silverness slid aside, and four figures came out into the dark. The star was hollow, and these were the gods who rode in it. Like the star, they were silver, and moved twinkling around their chariot, across the burned grass.

My eyes probed, trying to pierce the darkness that showed beyond the opening in the star. Curiosity tingled; I felt an incredible urge to move forward, to enter the darkness. I dug my fingers into the valley grass, half afraid I would rush toward the glittering danger before I could stop myself. And then the horror began.

Abruptly a figure reappeared around the silver thing’s side. Beside the opening it paused, hesitating, then turned to the stand of trees, and began to run toward me. The three others followed. At first I could not believe what I saw. But they drew nearer and nearer, and I was spectator no longer. On fright-numbed legs I got up, and propelled myself away from them, staggering and stumbling in the tall grass. No use for cover now; they knew I existed, and had broken whatever sacred privacy they held as their due. I ran from tree line to tree line, making desperately back the way I had come, for the shelter of the woods. But I knew all the time that they would outrun me. Thrusting out between ferns and narrow trunks, I met a silvery glowing shape in my path, and spinning around and back, found another. They circled me, hemming me in, and quickly the last two hunters had joined them, and I was trapped in a ring of light and fear. I raised frantic eyes to the lost woods above the valley. I did not even have a knife, not even a stick, though what use would these things have been? Against such a death as they had given the great lizard on the beach, to use a blade or spear was even more pitiful than to stand empty-handed. The light which came from them blinded me. Drunk with terror, I wished they would destroy me then and there, for the suspense of waiting was unendurable.

Then one of them spoke. I did not understand what was said. It was a new tongue, and very different from anything I had ever heard. After a moment the words stopped. A glittering shape leaned forward.

Now is death, I thought, but it drew back, and something lay on the grass at my feet. When I would not touch it, the figure motioned to itself, and I saw that it wore one of these things on its wrist. In the senseless blur of bewilderment and fear there seemed no point in refusal. I picked up a silver band in which a green gem winked, and clipped it on my wrist.

“Now we can understand one another,” a man’s voice said.

I thought at first my lost Power had come back to me, but then I realized this phenomenon stemmed from the wrist band.

“Don’t be afraid,” the voice said. “We mean you no harm.”

The voice was so like a human voice it reassured me, even though I was not certain if that were an effect of the band or not.

“If you mean me no harm,” I panted, “why hunt me through the valley?”

“This is the woman from the beach,” another male voice cut in. “White hair and the strange face-mask.”

“Yes, indeed,” said the first voice. “My name,” it added, “is Yomis Langort. We would like you to come with us, back to our ship.”

“Your ship?” I queried. “But it has no sail.”

Yomis Langort laughed. “No, that’s very true. But then it has no need of one.”

“I will not come with you,” I said.

“Why not? Surely you’re not afraid? With that creature on the beach you seemed brave enough. And you’re curious, aren’t you—about our sail-less ship?”

I turned my head and looked back at it between the trees. Perhaps they would destroy me if I did not come. Perhaps they would not harm me if I went with them. And the conviction was growing on me that these, at least, were not gods, only men.

“I will go with you, Yomis Langort,” I said.

“Good.”

We turned.

“Be careful not to touch us,” he said. “This is a protective clothing we wear. Look—” He picked a handful of grass and brushed it against his arm. The grass twisted and shriveled, and I thought once more of Asutoo’s gods.

“I am warned,” I said.

So we walked toward the hollow star.

I had not realized before how huge it was. The dark opening I had stared at was several feet from the ground, yet, as we drew near it, there came the purr of life, and the door way slid down far enough for us to enter. Lights came on softly as the opening slid up once again and closed itself. A semicircular room with open doors giving onto a corridor beyond. The room was quite plain, but the walls and floor and domed ceiling shimmered in the light-glow. Here my four guards—companions, captors—stripped the silver from their bodies and let it fall by the walls. The walls hummed and opened, and a draft of air like an indrawn breath pulled the clothing inside and shut again. I did not marvel at all; I had expected strangeness, and these things were at least logical as well as strange.

The men—they must be men—stretched and grinned as if glad to be free of the silver stuff. Under it they wore trousers, boots, and close-fitting, unornamented shirts of a white material with a metallic gleam.

Low-slung on the hips was a broad belt, one man’s red, two of the others brown, while the belt of Yomis Langort was black and violet. Otherwise there seemed little difference in them. Each was tall and leanly muscular, with tanned skin, blue eyes, and light-colored hair that was shorn at the nape of the neck. Their ages were peculiarly indeterminate, the faces young, the bodies strong, but around and behind the eyes the look of a longer life that has seen much.

“Come with me,” Yomis Langort said. He went through the open doors into the corridor beyond. I followed, and the three others fell into step behind me. The corridor shone with cool light. At intervals along its length, black and silver painted symbols appeared on the walls. From time to time a humming vibration would stir deep in the ship. The corridor stretched on and on without side turnings.

Abruptly Yomis Langort turned aside, facing one of the painted symbols. Concealed doors, which the symbol seemed to indicate, moved apart, but he did not enter.

“If you will wait here a moment,” he said to me, politely.

I went closer, and looked into a large oval room. The floor seemed like glass that was opaque and transparent at once. Tall, incredibly thin pillars of the same luminous stuff and set at apparently random intervals tapered upward to a ceiling flooded by pale gold light. There appeared to be no other furnishing.

A scent of alien things—pleasant but alarming drifted in the room, and I hung back, more because of this than any suspicion of imprisonment.

“First you run after me,” I said, “then you tell me ‘wait.’ ”

I glanced at the face of Yomis Langort, and saw on it that indulgent amusement I have seen on the face of a bandit with the time to be good-humored as he tries to coax some nervous, skittish animal into the horse-field.

“Yes,” I said, “you are not mistaken. I am not at ease.”

“There’s nothing to worry you here,” he said. And then firmly: “Please.”

There seemed no choice, so I went past him into the room, and the doors whispered shut behind me.

Alone, I wandered over the crystalline floor, ran fidgety, quick fingers across the icy surface of the pillars. I waited a long while, and grew weary of standing, so sat myself on the floor. At once a gasp came from the near wall, and through an opening glided a round, backless couch of some semi transparent material. I walked about the couch, half afraid to sit on it. It seemed the thing had read my mind, or perhaps some mechanism had judged what I wanted by my action of sitting. Finally I tried the couch, which was both resilient and firm. A silly game came into my mind. “Water!” I said aloud, to see if there would be any response. There was. Almost immediately, through the wall, came a slender one-legged table, bearing a tall flagon made of what seemed to be a sort of milky glass. I sniffed at the liquid inside it; water glittered and tasted cold and sparkling on my tongue. “Wine,” I said. And another table entered with a brown glass goblet like a hollow egg on a tall stem. Russet fluid seared my nostrils and burned my mouth like acid. Strange wine, then, that the sky gods drank. I called for apples, but when they came, in a green tripodal bowl, they were a curious shape and had a speckled skin, and the peaches were too long and covered by soft red fur. I recollected then that I spoke through the intermediary of the wrist-band. All these things were equivalents, and it was perhaps dangerous to make any further demands, not knowing what I might receive.

I left the couch and the scatter of tables and dubious refreshment, and now a sudden claustrophobia took hold of me. It was more than fear, a kind of panicky excitement, as if something vast, terrible, insupportable were about to happen to me, not necessarily damaging or evil, but not for a moment to be borne. And it would happen—must—if I remained here in this room.

I hurried to the place of the hidden doors and, as I had thought, they opened at once. And, as I had also thought, two men turned and blocked my way.

“Please wait a little longer,” one said impassively.

“We have our orders,” the other said. “We’re not to let you pass.”

He moved a little so that I could see clearly the weapon thrust through his belt. It was like no other weapon I had ever seen, and this, more than anything, convinced me it could be dangerous.

“For what must I wait?” I asked them.

But in that moment the two guards lost interest in me. They turned abruptly to face the corridor. Doors farther along and to the left had opened, and a man had stepped through. I caught a glimpse of his clothing—black, not white, though a white belt rested on his thin hips. Yomis Langort and another man came through behind him.

I backed into my room, and the doors shut, but it was no safeguard, they would open as soon as the stranger approached them.

The stranger.

I backed farther across the room, between the pillars, until I had reached the far side. My spine rested against the wall. I pressed my hands flat to it, while my blood and brain curdled, and a horse leaped under my breast. I could not think. I could think of nothing.

The doors opened. I tried to shut my eyes but the lids would not stay together. He was alone.

Across the black shirt slashed four violet bars, and, where the material ended and the tanned line of his neck began, some silver insignia was clipped. The thick black hair, grown only to the nape and then lopped short, reminded me of so many things which no longer mattered. He stopped still, facing me.

“I am Rarm Zavid, the captain of this ship,” he said.

Fury and terror flooded into my eyes like tears, into my mouth like blood.

“No,” I screamed at him. “You are Darak. You are Darak, or you are Vazkor—you are the nightmare, the undead—the haunting Karrakaz sends to destroy my will and my life.” I was quite mad by now.

Pressed at the wall, I railed against him, and cried, and cursed him, and begged him to leave me. It was the culmination of all the passion and despair I had ever known. “I will not ride with you in the chariot,” I shrieked out at him. “Or fight for you, or bear your children, or watch you die! In the name of all the dead gods of the world, what have I done to conjure you up again!”

I suppose he stood and watched me all this time. He did not come to me, or touch me, or speak to me until the outburst ended. And what ended it was nothing of his will or mine. It was the feel of the wall beneath my hands, trembling and throbbing like a great tortured heart.

Silence closed my mouth. And in the silence I heard the roar of some vast machinery subsiding thrust by thrust. I pulled my hands from the wall. Bewildered, I could only look to him for an explanation, and so it was to him I looked.

“I came here to ask you questions,” he said. “There’s no longer any need. You’ve given me my answer.”

The narrow dark eyes gave away nothing at all, yet his face had none of the arrogance of Darak’s, nor the cold blankness of Vazkor’s. “I think,” he said, “that you’ve also convinced me that I greatly resemble someone who has been close to you, and died, out there—” He made a vague gesture with one arm, indicating a world which was mine, not his.

“Two men,” I said. “Two men. Now three men. Darak the bandit, Vazkor the sorcerer, Rarm Zavid the captain of a sky-ship which has no sail.”

The madness was spent. Wearily I watched him come closer to me.

“You don’t understand what you’ve done,” he said. “Do you?”

“What have I done.”

“If you truly have no idea, then I don’t think that you’re ready to be told.”

“All my life,” I said, “knowledge has come to me for which I was not ready.”

“My ship,” he said, “this vast space-wanderer. You plucked it out of the sky like a grape from a vine; pulled it down so fast, two shields were damaged. And when we were near enough, you activated our defense beams and killed the dragon-lizard on the beach with them. This impudence not being enough for you, you followed us. and when you found the place we had berthed to repair the shields, you kept open our main hatchway for reasons best known to yourself. This activity gave away your presence. Yomis and three others caught you and brought you back. Since then you’ve played with circuits of the ship designed to respond only to members of the crew.” He indicated the couch and tables. “And finally you have communicated your emotional distress to the ship, with the results you yourself have just heard and felt.” I said nothing, no longer caring greatly that I did not understand. “Until now,” Rarm Zavid said softly, “the men who watched your planet considered themselves further advanced in development. Now I begin to wonder. I see you are a woman, but beyond that, what are you?”

“I am nothing,” I said. “Let me go.”

“Nothing. And the ship. How do you explain that?”

“I cannot explain. I do not understand. I did not even know of your presence until the sound, and the Shadow on the beach. How can I have done all these things you say I have done? How?”

“I think I could tell you,” he said.

He stood in front of me, but I could no longer look at him. His voice, the voice of Darak and Vazkor, came to me distantly across great hills of exhausted misery.

“The ship,” he said, “is more than a ship. It is built around a core of—Power is a word I think you will understand. This Power is like a great brain, linked into every part of the ship. We have our own words for this brain, but your world, as yet, has none. In the brain of each ship is endless information about every man who travels in her. These memories can be changed or wiped clean at any time, but they make life easier for us. Because of them the brain knows from our commands, actions, even our thoughts, what we need. A meal, a book, a chair, come when we want them. If a man is hurt in some inaccessible part of the ship, there’s no fear that he’ll go unattended, because the brain will send equipment to his aid. The brain also guides the ship, defends her, and takes her from world to world. All systems, in fact, are connected intimately with the brain, and the brain responds to the particular mind-patterns of her crew.

Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said dully.

“Normally,” he said, “no mind-patterns outside those of her crew can interfere with the brain of the ship; the minds of our worlds are not powerful enough for that, nor have we found such power beyond our worlds—until now. It was an unforeseen circumstance that a mind, to which the brain had never before been given access, should suddenly reach out, make contact with it, and dominate. The brain was powerless. It obeyed you. It brought the ship down to the beach and killed the lizard.”

“Obeyed me?” I said. “I did not call to your ship.” “You did,” he said. “The proof of that is our presence in this valley.”

“I did not know I did it. When the Shadow came I was afraid.”

“Yes,” he said slowly, “I believe you didn’t know. It was clear you didn’t understand when the ship responded to you a few minutes ago.”

“Then let me free,” I said.

He stood looking at me, and his eyes penetrated my tiredness. I looked up at him also. His face was absorbed, serious.

“No,” he said. “It’s plain to me you have nothing to go to. It’s plain to me you are in distress and danger.

In all the time that we’ve watched this world, our rule has been never to interfere with the frequently mistaken and bloody development of its human life. You have forced us to interfere. So let’s forget that rule as regards to you.” “I am unimportant.”

“You don’t believe that,” he said. “Why expect me to believe it?”

“I am a bringer of death,” I said. “The two men that you resemble died because of me. You will die if I stay near you.”

“No,” he said, “I don’t think that you’ll bring death to me.”

There was a stirring in me, a little trickle of hope and warmth that ran into my veins and thoughts. Darak had always believed me more than him, and feared me, and so the curse I carried had found him easy prey. Vazkor, in his power-lust and single-mindedness, had been even more afraid, perhaps, of the goddess on his right hand. But this man had no awe of me. No real awe for all he said. He sought to understand a mystery he imagined he had found in me; he who rode and was master of this great thinking ship. He had no fear.

He smiled. He saw I had given up my will to his. It had no feel of chains or panic, but only of a great relief and quietness.

“Beyond this room,” he said, “there is a room where you can bathe and sleep. Tell the door not to open to anyone else until it has your permission, and you’ll find it very private. You could have held these doors shut against me. I wonder why you didn’t. Anything you need, the ship will provide. In the morning—but that is the morning.”

I turned to follow his instructions, but he said abruptly, “Why do you wear that mask?”

“I am cursed with great ugliness of face,” I said. It did not occur to me to evade the question, or to lie.

He said nothing in answer, and so I walked to the far wall once again, and moved along it until doors opened. I went through, and instructed them as he had told me. I did not see the room, except that there was a place to sleep. I lay down on it, and thought and sight and pain extinguished themselves like sudden lamps.

2

I woke, I thought, to full sunlight, but the glow spread across the ceiling, and not from any window. I lay still, remembering at once all that had happened to me, in a curious detached way. After a time I sat up and looked at the room about me.

My bed was a dark blue circular couch, much larger than the one I had called up before, and quite opaque ... yet it had the same resilient firmness that gave comfort without pampering. Like the couch, the room was circular, topped by its soft sunburst of a ceiling, with smooth walls the pale blue color of harebells, and a floor set with a pattern of little squares of dark blue and silver. On my right a painted dark blue symbol seemed to indicate doors other than those I had entered by. The artists of Ankurum insist that a room of blue colors can bring only melancholy, but they are very wrong. This room had warmth and security.

I put my feet to the floor, and noticed it was smooth and softly heated. As I stood up, the bed retired gracefully into the wall. The symbolized doors opened before I was halfway to them. Beyond lay a tiny bathing apartment and, as in Ezlann, water ran hot as well as cold from silver beaks into the bath. Blue towels presented themselves as I left the bath, and a fan of warm air. A crystal tray slid from the wall, bearing crystal bottles of perfume, combs, and even cosmetics, while a long mirror sidled out behind me, and frightened me when I turned and saw myself so abruptly. It seemed oddly ungrateful to refuse such an ardent host. I could not help but think of it as something with feelings, though this made no sense. I washed and dried and combed out my hair, perfumed it and my body, and looked with distaste for the dirty tattered shift I had left on the floor. It was gone.

I remembered then how Yomis Langort and my captors had discarded their silver clothing, and the wall had whisked it away. I looked appealingly at the walls, and nothing happened. Hastily I clipped on again the intermediary wrist band.

“My shift,” I said aloud, and still nothing happened. A smug silence hung over the room. “My clothing—what I was wearing—please give it back to me.” I had the distinct feeling that I was dealing with a mischievous animal or child. “Then I will go naked,” I said. But I did not want to. I also had learned by now the human superstition that nakedness is vulnerability.

I walked back into the blue room, and there was a stand there, and on it hung a long dress which seemed to be made from hyacinth-blue silk, and a delicate array of blue under garments such as I had worn in Ezlann. I put them on slowly, enjoying, despite everything, the luxury and comfort. When I lifted down the dress, I saw it was a model of that other dress I had worn in Ankurum, the white brocade in which I had sat through the agent’s supper, and in which, later, I had heard Darak give up both our lives to the Sagare. The dress had been beautiful, and somehow the brain of the ship had picked that information from my memories, yet, presumably because all the things in this room were blue, the dress was blue also, and I was glad of that one difference.

A mirror came and nudged me. When I turned, I saw the long reflection of myself, and there was a kind of beauty there, all the whiteness held in its shimmer of blue silk. Only the black mask denied beauty. I put my hands to it, and then drew them helplessly away.

“I am cursed with great ugliness of face,” I said.

The mirror and the stand slid away. A circular chair came, and I sat on it, and then a table with blue flagons of what seemed to be milk, and water, plates of what seemed to be new bread, and fruits like strawberries.

I sipped the liquids and nibbled at the foods. The pains were not very bad. I walked about the room.

He must know by now that I was awake, dressed, ready to speak to him. The ship would have told him.

Yet I was not ready to speak to him. Despite all acquiescence, fear had come back with the day. Fear of him, and fear, yes, fear of myself and what he said I had done.

And he did not come.

At last I turned away from the room, and went to the doors I had come in by on the day before. They opened for me, and beyond lay the glassy pillared space where I had waited. Someone else waited there now. I stopped still as the doors closed behind me. A man, rather older than Yomis Langort and the other men I had seen here, yet, like them, sparely and strongly built. Unlike them, he wore his whitish blond hair to his shoulders. A belted white tunic hung to his knees over the familiar, palely metallic trousers and boots. On his left wrist was clipped a silver band with a winking bright green light.

“Good morning. I am Ciorden Jathael, Computer Master of this ship.” He paused and eyed me with large gray eyes, shrewdly and swiftly taking in my appearance as if it were something he must quickly capture, store, take out again when I was gone, to examine more closely. “I see that you don’t understand. I believe Rarm—our captain—has told you of the brain which guides this ship? Computer is simply another name for it. But no matter. I am the guardian of the brain. I am able to link with it, gain a telepathic union with it. In order to do such a thing I must open my mind totally to the flow of information in the—brain. An ungifted and untrained man would be killed by such an act. I am blessed with the talent and instruction to survive the operation. Do not think I boast. I know my place. In times of danger, disaster, or malfunction I am invaluable. In a time of quiet and plenty, such as now, I am”—he smiled and made a gesture of amused self-negation—“very little.”

“And why are you here, Ciorden Jathael?”

“Because my captain sent me. Though I assure you, I am delighted to meet at last my rival in the computer—er—the brain’s affections.”

“Why were you sent, Ciorden Jathael?”

“Please,” he said kindly, “it’s quite unnecessary for you to call me by both names at once. Generally, it would be normal for you to address me by the second one, plus a suitable prefix, such as ‘Master.’

However, under the circumstances, Ciorden will do very well. Why was I sent? To take you to the computer’s core—the Hub.”

“Why?”

“Why.” He considered. “I’ve no idea,” he said finally with a look of slight despair.

I laughed, and some of the tension drained out of me. He seemed both incongruous and real in this new world.

“Well”—he smiled—“a better beginning than I hoped for. And do you also have a name?”

“I have no name.”

“Disturbing,” Ciorden said. “In our worlds, all things have names. Surely your planet isn’t immune from the nasty habit?” He held out his arm for me. We might have been in Ezlann or in Za, going in to some state occasion.

“My name, like my beginning, is lost,” I said.

A wall opened, and a pair of blue sandals emptied themselves onto the floor. Ciorden leaned down and picked them up. He sighed.

“The computer is always overjoyed when the ship carries a passenger. Men who live in uniform and travel the same starways year after year bore it no end. There’s no excitement in guessing what they require. But you—not only new, but different, and a woman as well.”

“Does this—computer-brain—think and feel as a man would?” I asked him. I had imagined from the tone in which Rarm spoke of it that it was inanimate and passionless.

“Not as a man, perhaps. But as a being. Our scientists disagree with this. A machine, they say. But if there are no emotional quirks in the thing to begin with, it grows them. All Computer Masters would tell you the same. Now, don’t disappoint your admirer. Put on the sandals, and we’ll visit the Hub.”

The corridor beyond my rooms branched a little farther along into two fresh curving ways. Ciorden led me leftward, and a little farther on, when this corridor also branched, to the right. The walls and floors altered as we walked. There were no longer symbols indicating doors. Everything was silver as on the outside of the ship. The corridor ended apparently in a blank wall, but when we reached it, that section of floor and wall began to sink with us.

“Don’t be alarmed,” Ciorden said. “The Hub lies between this and the two lower decks. A flight of stairs would have done as well.”

For a moment or so we remained in a cage of blank walls, falling, and then the vista of a new corridor slid into place in front of us, and we were still. The corridor was white. At the far end a silver symbol on the closed wall.

Ciorden went to the wall, and stood aside to let me enter first as the doors parted.

It was a large oval room, held in a kind of luminous darkness. Each wall glowed metal, and the occasional eye of a light burned and extinguished itself. At the center of the room, a single metallic column reached for and obtained the ceiling. Colored panels smoldered like sleepy jewels across its surface. But I did not enter the room. I was afraid to touch the glittering spider’s web which threaded and cross-threaded over it, weaving every wall together without a break.

“I cannot enter, Ciorden,” I said.

“Oh”—Ciorden smiled—“I should explain. What you see are quite harmless light rays.” He stepped past me, and stood among them, his face and body abruptly latticed with color. “As you see, I don’t hurt them, neither do they hurt me. If, however, some intruder or madman ran in here to damage the Hub, the computer, reading his mind, would activate the rays to stun him and also to sound an alarm. A defense is essential here. It’s only in this one space that the computer stands vulnerable, naked, one might say, an opened heart revealing all its complexity of valves and mechanisms. Come.”

I followed him then, and was absorbed also into the web of light. He walked about the gently purring column, stroking it with one hand. Panels ignited and darkened.

“In here,” he murmured fondly, “endless knowledge, balanced judgment, and the intimate details of every life aboard this ship. We are at present fifty-two men. Each of our minds has a replica inside this metal covering, a much finer and more accurate mind than the one we carry inside our skulls. Every detail of our experience is caught here, the truth as it happened to us, not as we think it happened after twenty years of forgetting. Babies cry in this column, boys climb trees, and fall in love, and dream of the spacemen they long to become. Fifty-two unblurred memories.” He paused and looked at me. “And, of course, now yours also.”

Tangled in the web, my skin chilled stiffly.

“Mine? I am not of your worlds. How can I be—in there?”

“Because your brain contacted, overruled even, the brain of the computer. To serve you, it had to understand you, as it has to understand the crew of the ship, in order to serve them. That is the way in which it was built. Imagine,” he said, “imagine that one year ago you were given a wonderful food on some far planet, and you thought it had a certain taste of this and that, but you had forgotten, and were wrong. The food which the computer brought you would also be wrong. Allow it to penetrate your mind, and find what it really tasted like one year ago, and it can give you what you want. That is perhaps a frivolous example, but the basic principle holds true from a chosen meal to a man lying injured and unconscious and in need of help.”

“So,” I said, very softly, as if I might keep the thing from hearing me, “all my thought, memory, every atom of my life—is known to your computer.”

“Yes,” Ciorden said. “Known better than you know it yourself. You told me that your name, like your beginning, was lost. Inside this column nothing of you is lost. If you have a name, it is here, and the beginning of your life, which you have consciously forgotten, is remembered.”

My beginning. My child’s life before I had woken under the Mountain. The things which came in dreams, the swan lakes, the marble stairways, the leaping evil of the flame. Panic filled me. I did not stop for a moment to think why. I turned to the doorway of the room to run away, and Rarm stood there, the doors shut behind him. I did not know how much he had heard. All of it, it seemed. His face appeared dark and emotionless and without compassion, the face of Vazkor.

“You tricked me here,” I said to Ciorden. “And you also,” I said to the man in the doorway. I was terrified. I gripped my shaking hands together. “I never thought you gods. Now I see you are truly men, with all the petty curiosity of men. If I have given my brain to your machine I will give nothing further to you. Let me go. I will be no part of your outworld experiments on a race you consider inferior to your own.”

“I’m afraid,” Rarm said, “that you can’t leave this ship now. In the past few minutes we’ve lifted from the valley, and are now in orbit around your world.”

“I do not understand you,” I said. But I did.

“Ciorden,” Rarm said.

Ciorden brushed his hand along the column. The metal walls of the room melted. Only in a nightmare could I have believed such a thing to exist about me. On every side black skies filled with the searing white drops of stars. On every side, distance, the void, black walls pulling the soul outward through the eyes, to fall into limitless nothingness. And below, a bluish sphere hanging like a lantern. A world. The world that I had run through, which had seemed so solid and so huge to me.

The need to cling to something stable was unbearable. I turned to the metal pillar and hid my face against it, shutting my eyes, holding to it, as if to let go would be to send myself spinning into the black emptiness forever.

And under my hands, the pillar throbbed and whined.

3

Trees, growing from metallic channels in the floor, spread their green feathers against the high roof, dusted black feathers of shadows across the painted walls of this indoor garden of another planet.

Elongated red flowers spilled like blood from urns of glass.

I sat among the flowers, smelling their strange scent, watching him look at me. I was not entirely sure how I had come here. There had been sound and burning lights, and alarms like the alarms of war. Their ship had responded to my horror until Ciorden presumably managed to quiet it. Then Rarm must have brought me to this place, as if these strange growing things could put an end to the hollow icy tension in the pit of my belly, which had come with the knowledge of the blackness all around me. I was glad to have inconvenienced them. Yet it was all the pleasure I had.

“You’re a risk to my ship,” Rarm said. “Your mind holds a power which you can’t or won’t control. You could kill us all.”

“Then let me go.”

He came and sat beside me, and I turned away from him, staring at the red flowers.

“Let me go,” I repeated.

“Can’t you see your own danger? Your life is misery to you. The computer can analyze all our minds, and that is what it has to say of you. If you let me, I can help you.”

“Why?”

“Not as an experiment, which is what you think.”

“I am,” I said, tasting the bitterness of the words, “inferior to your race.”

“Inferior is a word you misuse. Men of my worlds have watched your planet for many years, because it held men like themselves—human men. Primitive by our standards, perhaps. Our bloody struggles are in the past, yours are to come. Time is the barrier, only time. And time does not make superiors or inferiors, only differences. Let me help you.”

“What can you do?” I said coldly.

“Not what I can do. The computer.”

“No.”

“Why ‘No’? Ciorden believes there’s an answer to this thing which locks you out from yourself—and the computer has it.”

“No.”

“Yes. Are you afraid to be answered?”

“I am afraid,” I said. “That is enough.”

“Of what?” He grasped my shoulders suddenly, turning me toward him, his hands insistent, strong, well-remembered.

“You are Darak,” I murmured. “Darak in the inn-room at Ankurum, in the dark tent on the South Road.”

“Through the computer, with the help of Ciorden as your intermediary,” he said levelly, “you can relive, in the space of a few hours, your life from the moment of your birth.”

“No,” I said. I began to cry. “Let me go.”

Abruptly he stood up.

“Then I must do it,” he said.

He turned toward the doors. I ran after him. I shouted at him and tried to hold him back, but I did not seem to have any strength. I did not want him to know me as I knew myself, could not bear it. And then there was a barrier between us. I could neither feel nor see it, but neither could I pass by it. He had reached the doors.

“Before,” he said, “I was unprepared for you. Now I take no chances. I am the captain of this ship, and my final instruction overrides even your powers. That instruction has been given. Without a contrary order from me, you will not be allowed to follow me, though you may return to your room. Any attempt to undermine the computer with emotion will result in your instant anesthesia. Do you understand me?”

“Please—” I said.

But the doors had shut behind him.

For a long time I lingered in that garden room. I touched the flowers and they opened briefly. The shadow of the trees stirred in a little artificial breeze.

My thoughts came spasmodically. I longed to hide myself, to seek out a death I could not achieve.

Shame and despair and the unknown dread pulled me down.

Finally I left the garden, and it let me. In the corridor I realized I did not know the way back to my rooms. At once a beam of light struck down from the ceiling, pointing ahead of me. I walked toward it numbly, and it moved away. It led me through many corridors, and upward on another of the moving floors. Twice I passed a group of men, who fell silent as I went by them, following the beam. I sensed intense interest, and little liking. I was a danger to them, yet rare and curious for all that, like the orchids of the north which will snap off a man’s finger for the meat. I reached the glassy place, crossed it, and entered the blue silence which was the only part of this ship I might be safe in.

The bed slid from the wall, and I went to it, my body heavy as lead.

I lay silent, thinking how he raped my mind in the light webbed room. I thought of the emptiness and the void in me, terrible as the void which had swallowed the ship.

And then a new thought came, a little sharp thought, burning its way into my skull. I recalled what I had feared at their hands when they took me. Their power was vast, the power of the computer-brain seemed godlike.

“Kill me,” I whispered to the silence. “Let me die.”

A deep humming filled the room, a frenzied angry sound.

“Serve me,” I said. “Obey me. Death is what I want. Give me death.”

My bed trembled. There came the drone of distant thunder. A new, a limitless cold settled on me. My eyes darkened. Tears choked me. It had given me what I wanted. And perhaps it was strong enough, stronger than the swords of Vazkor’s soldiers, more lasting than the grave in the desert, and the fallen tower at Eshkorek.

Something glittered through the dark. A knife swooping down on me from the light-glow of the ceiling. I felt my breathing stop.

“Wake up,” Darak said to me impatiently.

“Let me alone,” I muttered. “I am dead.”

“No, you’re not dead, goddess. Drink this.”

Something forced itself under the fold of the shireen, and into my mouth. Thin cool fluid found my throat.

I swallowed, and pushed the thing away. Without opening my eyes, I sat up. Whirling colors filled my brain. To escape them I opened my eyes after all. I saw the blue room, and could not remember where I was. I laughed stupidly at Darak’s angry face. I could not understand why he was so angry.

“Dead.” He tried the word contemptuously on his tongue. “Didn’t it occur to you that a machine especially programmed to bring comfort and life to its crew would also be programmed never to kill them? If you were a savage or a barbarian it would make some sense—but you can think and reason.”

He stood up. “My whole ship damaged if I hadn’t blocked you with that one inspired order. Anesthesia the moment you presented the computer with an emotional problem.” He leaned over, took my shoulders, and shook me violently. “Couldn’t you trust me?”

“Darak,” I said.

“No, I’m not Darak Gold-Fisher, the hill-bandit charioteer. Neither am I Vazkor the murderer, the first successful step toward death and darkness that your planet has so far taken. I am Rarm Zavid, the fool.

Up on your feet.” He lifted me, and held me upright. “Drink some more of this. Now walk.” We walked.

I began to recall where I was and all that had happened. I tried very hard not to, but he would not allow me. Finally he let me go, and I saw his face clearly for the first time. It was strained, concentrated into a look of frustration and regret rather than anger. I remembered that he and Ciorden had lived in my mind in the Hub. And I hated them.

“Has my life brought you joy, Rarm?” I asked him, spite fully sweet in my shame.

“As much joy as it brought you, goddess.”

“Never call me that.”

“What, then, am I to call you? You say you have no name. No,” he said suddenly, “I shouldn’t be angry with you.”

“You have no right to be angry. You had no right to my mind.”

He looked at me, and again the helpless anger caught his face, then faded.

“Listen,” he said. “One thing I learned; the flame—the creature you saw in the stone bowl, what you call Karrakaz—told you, you would be free, would regain your beauty and your powers, when and if you found your soul-kin, the Jade. If I assured you that the computer holds the solution to that quest, would you do as I told you?”

My heart throbbed thickly. I stared at him.

“How—can it know?”

“Because you know. The answer is in your own mind. But it comes from the time before you woke under the volcano. That time—that short time—is all you have to relive in order to set yourself free forever.”

“I cannot believe you,” I whispered.

“Are you willing to let go by such a chance to find the Jade?”

I turned to him. Hate boiled in me. I gripped his arm.

“You tell me! You know!”

“I can’t tell you. Not until you understand. You must come to the computer.”

I half turned toward the doorway, half ready to go with him. But the unreasoning fear rose and engulfed me.

“The computer,” I repeated. I took one stiff step forward, and my knees melted. I fell, and found I could not get up. I could not move my legs, my feet, my arms or hands. Paralyzed, deadened, I cried out to him in despair. My eyes were almost blind; I could hardly speak. “Karrakaz,” I choked out, knowing now that the Jade lay within my reach, and that, seeing this, the demon of my race had risen to deprive me of it. “Karrakaz will destroy me.”

“No,” he said, though his voice seemed distant and almost meaningless. He had picked me up, but, numbed, deafened, blinded, in an incredible extremity of terror, I could not follow what happened to me, or where he took me, and at last the horrible darkness swept in like the hungry sea, and drowned me, and bore me away into itself, and I was lost.

4

Birth is pain. All emotions of sorrow, fear, and anguish begin in that struggle and rejection. After birth the world is abstract, senseless, yet peculiarly orderly. Nothing is logical, therefore illogicality is rational and sane. Suck, sleep, silences and sounds fill and refill a distorted plane where colors slide on the unfocused eyes. There is no time, yet time passes.

Out of the cloudiness things grew, and took on meaning. White swans moving across glittering water, stretching out their looping necks to be fed. A woman with long pale hair, who led me by the hand through ornate gardens leading to the sea, over the floors of incredible rooms where elegant men and women sat. Sometimes there would be others, large, uncouth, staring, dirty, their bodies brown and scarred. They made me afraid, for they were not like us. Like savage, ugly animals, they haunted the walks, their figures contorted to dig at the beds of flowers. Our slaves.

I must not speak to them, but I did, one, a man slave, axing down a slender tree. I asked him why he did it.

“The tree is diseased, princess,” he said, in the awkward grumble with which they stumbled out our tongue. Then he stared down at me from his great height. His face was hideous, distorted by a pain I could not understand, for he was smiling. “All diseased things,” he said, “must be cut down. And burned.”

His eyes ate their way into mine. Frightened, I backed from him, and in that moment the prince who was my father came. The slave’s face altered to a look of moronic terror. The prince picked me up with one arm. With the other he summoned the four guards who came behind him. Two seized the man and brought him down on his face. Another stripped his shirt. A fourth stood ready, a metal edged whip dripping from his hands.

“Now kill him,” said my father, stroking my hair. “But slowly. My royal daughter must see what happens to all those who dare insult us.”

The whip rose and fell monotonously. The man screamed and flopped and blood wriggled in the grass like snakes. I was glad at first, but soon I grew bored. I looked at my father’s soldiers, and they too were slaves, though, better treated and better clothed, they looked very different. It did not seem to matter to them that they whipped one of their own kind.

Soon the man died, and my father took me away.

Three years and many days of lily-lakes, marble-pillared rooms, entertainments of death and beauty.

Then fear came. At first fear was only a transparent shadow thrown in the distance, a whisper, something hidden behind layers of thought and activity. Then fear grew deeper and closer, and lay inside the mouth, ready to be hinted at and half-spoken.

To begin with, I did not know the fear, only sensed it. I heard the word “plague” and it meant nothing to me. I heard of death, but that I rejected totally. We would live almost forever. Nothing could harm us.

We were not slaves to die from sickness or a wound.

But then, a scarlet dawn, and my mother’s sister screaming and screaming, running through the palace walks naked, her pale hair flaming behind her, an insanity of whiteness against the blood-red sky. Her lover was dead of the Plague, had died lying across her. She had woken to find him, his flesh decomposing against hers. I did not know what was done, but, as the days passed, I came to know, for others died. A pyre was built beyond the lake, and here what remained of them, and of their clothes, was burned. If the corpse was discovered quickly enough, slaves could be sent in to make a cast of the body, and this would be painted and decked in jewels and buried in the owner’s tomb in place of their flesh. But often it was too late for that; the body would already be putrescent. And this was why the Plague was so damaging to us, for nothing would remain to heal itself, not flesh or sinew or any organ, not the brain, not even the bones. True annihilation had come among us at last.

There were no symptoms of the Plague in its victims before they succumbed to the coma, therefore, no warning. And the infection spread like rottenness.

My mother died. I could not understand why she should leave me. I was terrified, and wept with terror, not sorrow, as I walked behind her jeweled bier—empty, for she had been too quick for them. I stared at the painted pictures of her tomb deep in the vaults of the palace. The sleeping woman-shape under the mountain with its sky cloud, which was the symbol of birth and of the planet which supported it; the woman with her guard, and rods of office, a symbol of her temporal power; the woman holding the knife toward herself, symbol of her final acceptance of death. I hated these terrible paintings—the same in every tomb, save that in a man’s sepulcher a drawn man would replace the woman in them. I hated the traditional jade set in at the face, as though death had made my mother faceless.

My father came to me at dusk. The low lamplight picked out the small luminous triangle of green above and between his eyes, as he leaned toward my bed.

“Tomorrow you must be up early,” he said. “We are going on a journey.”

“Where?”

“To a place, a place underground, a temple. We shall be safe there.”

The summer too was dead, and rains and winds blew across the land as we traveled from the northern shore. Drifts of bronze leaves stagnated on the rivers and the lakes.

Members of other great houses came with us. The slaves drove our wagons, put up our tents at night, and saw to our needs much as they had done in our palaces. None of them took the Plague, nor did they seem to fear it. Only one man tried to run away. From my wagon flap I watched him blunder on spindly legs across the harvested fields of some village. One of the princes turned and looked hard at the running man. The man fell immediately, and did not rise. The power to kill had not come to me yet, nor the power to levitate my body from the ground. The slaves watched in terror any of us who did this; in their own abominable tongue they called us the Winged Ones, imagining we must have invisible wings, and that we flew.

A princess died on the fifth day of our journey. And, at a little mud-brick town they called Sirrainis, my father’s almost whole body was burned on the branches of forest trees.

My mother’s sister, who still lived, became my formal guardian, though she was frowned on for she had taken one of the human guard for her lover. To me he seemed as disgusting and as ugly as the rest, though he pleased her well enough.

Two days later we reached the mountain under which the temple lay. I did not fully comprehend the notion of gods, but that my people had occasionally worshiped them had always been vaguely apparent to me. The great offering cups of the palace, holding always their undying flame, were the symbol of prayers unspoken. As in the tomb paintings, the mountain was the sign of the earth which had bred our might. It had seemed fitting to them, therefore, to hollow out their holy places under mountains, or rather to have them hollowed out by the slaves.

It was a black frowning height, which seemed to offer no comfort. Beyond the massive doors, dimly lit corridors and stairs had been chipped from the dark rock. White-robed men in golden masks chanted in a cavern about a huge rough-hewn stone bowl, fountaining flame. Dismal, cold, unwholesome place. I cried myself to sleep in my little rock cell, as I would cry myself to sleep for half a year.

In the first months there were few deaths from the Plague. Those few were consigned to a blazing crater higher in the mountain, reached by a narrow stair above the cavern. This crater, the white-robed men told us, was all that remained of the volcano it had once been. They were priests, these men, though they had not been so for long, perhaps. They gave an impression of impermanence, and stumbled sometimes over their chanting. They were of our race, and walked like the princes.

Our toll being lighter, a kind of optimism came. It seemed the holiness of the temple had indeed granted us sanctuary. We went three times each day to offer prayers to the nebulous gods I could not comprehend. Adults and children alike, we kneeled in the icy cavern about the bowl with the flame, entreating forgiveness for the hubris which had angered them. This also made no sense to me. Who were we to beg and wail on our knees, who had been masters of all men?

Apart from the prayers, there was little to fill my time. No entertainments were allowed. They gave me books to read, which I did not manage well for again they spoke of our gods. Some, the writings of princes and princesses, told only of our offenses and our punishment. Those who admitted their guilt, however, might be saved, might escape even after the coma of death had claimed them, sleeping, but not dying, awaking whole after some indefinite period of time, to reclaim their powers.

I wandered most of the day about the gut of the mountain, straying into forbidden rooms where the priests’ robes hung, up great flights of stairs, into dark places which frightened me.

Chief among the priests was the prince called Sekish. I feared and hated him. He wore a scarlet robe, and, while many of our people were very fair, Sekish was dark-skinned and black-haired. Tall and gaunt, his shadow fell black across me as he stood before my mother’s sister and berated her for her human lover.

“You choose beneath you,” he snarled. “You bring the anger of the Powerful Ones upon us all.”

“You are what I should choose, perhaps, Sekish?” she said, and I cowered for her. But he straightened, the green triangle above and between his eyes glinting like the third eye of his contempt. He turned and left her, and three days later he pronounced a ban on slaves. Either they left the mountain, or they would be killed. They went gladly, her lover among them. He was her talisman against death, it seemed to me, and, after four months of hope, she was the first new victim of the Plague.

Within a space of seven days, ten more were dead. Hysteria broke out within the mountain, and Sekish, the Dark One, walked among us, boring into our souls with his narrow black eyes, telling us to pray, to repent, to acknowledge our wickedness, and the evil which we had created, and which had returned to destroy us.

From morning to night now the chants of self-abasement before the stone bowl. The fine clothing, the jewelry, were put away. Men and women walked with their hair loose about them, in plain shifts and tunics, beating at themselves with rods until blood ran, beating again as soon as the swiftly healing wounds had closed. Everywhere the sound of terror, frenzied contrition, despair, as the lords of men groveled on their knees.

“Karrakaz,” I whispered before the flame in the bowl, my body stiff and aching, “I am the evil on the earth’s face, I am the blight, the diseased thing, the filthy, the accursed.”

Around me others whispered as I did. Clouds of whispering rose like steam. I thought of the statue of my father in the hall of his palace, the glossy stuff of which it was made, how I had laughed to see both him and it stand side by side, two identical men, short-bearded, long-haired. Now the statue would be all that was left of him. I began to cry. I buried my face in my hands, forgetting my chant of self-sin, until the black cold shadow of Sekish lay dank on me.

“Yes, child, weep,” he cried out in his terrible voice. “Weep for your maggot birth, and the foulness which is in you, the foulness which your mother and father allowed to grow from their lusts.” He leaned closer and seized my arm. Around us the chanting faltered and ceased. “But you do not weep for that, I see. It is a rebellious child, daring to dream of its damned past. This child may bring Their wrath on us.”

Eyes stared at me. He dragged me nearer to the huge stone bowl, and the flame slashed his face with color. He held me facing that fire, and leaning close, he hissed into my ear: “You are filthy, you are evil, the spawn of evil, the womb of evil. The Power in you is corrupt, horrible. The full Power—pray, pray never to attain it! Hubris, wickedness, ugliness, evil. You are the dirt of the dark places, dung of monsters in the pit of lust. Speak it. Speak it.”

In terror, I limped after him.

“I am filthy ... evil ... Power is corrupt, horrible ... I will pray never to attain it!”

Over and over again the ghastly words were spewed as he held me before the flame in his iron hands. I repented that I had thought of my father. I did not understand, but I learned. I became degraded and filthy. I shriveled and twisted and was damned.

When he let me down, I ran to my cell and curled myself together, hiding my face and as much of my body as I could from any awareness in the room. I felt the watching eyes of gods upon me, judging and condemning. Could I doubt that I would die also now, my flesh dripping from my bones in the dark?

Yet I woke to my misery with the new day. Sekish lay before the stone bowl, what there remained of him.

After Sekish there was no other leader. Yet we did not need one, our own guilt and fear was leader enough.

In that last month, death stripped us, until only a handful remained, eight or nine princes and princesses of the great houses of the north, and a handful of priests. If any lived outside our shelter, we had no word, neither any hope of it. The earth had snatched her gifts from us, given herself back to the human savages who had once possessed her.

And then the thunder came which set the final seal on our darkness. Deep within itself the sleeping mountain had stirred and trembled. Upper galleries of the temple had fallen, leaving in their wake staircases which now led nowhere, their platforms shorn away, rooms hollowed out by collapsing rocks.

Where it finally settled, the debris had blocked the great air funnels built into the mountain. Now the air that meant life and food to us could no longer enter, and the air which remained grew stale and poisonous.

One by one they fell into the sleep of suffocation, and one by one, as they lay in their rooms like pale embalmed dolls with stopped clockwork hearts, the Plague came and melted them into wax.

I wandered the silent temple slowly, panting, and sobbing when I had enough breath for it. I watched them die. There are no words for the emotions in me as I lingered, waiting to follow them to their disgusting end.

There was a princess, and she remained whole longer than the rest. She lay in her trance, her white hair spread around her, her straight white limbs bright under the thin robe. Between her breasts glistened a drop of diamond—the gift of some long-dead lover—which she had not taken off even in her agonies of repentance. Each day I would drag myself to her cell, and sit by her on the floor, holding her limp hand as if this were a protection and a comfort.

One day I came and the white lamp of her skin was spilled into a reeking stain on the couch.

I went back to my little cell. I curled myself together. For the last time I cried myself to sleep.

5

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 there was a new darkness, full of a pattern of light. I was afraid. I struggled to release myself from the bands which seemed to hold me, tried to cry out, and even my body and my voice were new to me.

Then came an avalanche of color, sound, movement, cascading across my mind, drenching it and leaving it bruised. The rest of my life had passed swiftly, as if someone had flicked over the pages of a huge book, too fast. Yet I could remember now that this was not that first awakening under the mountain, that first awakening as a woman, who had fallen asleep as a four-year-old child.

Around me the throb of hidden engines in the silver star ship.

Hands drew a metal circlet from my head, and metal bracelets from my wrists. I rose from the metal chair, and I was free.

I looked at Ciorden, where he still sat, slowly drawing the metal bands from himself. His face was clenched and pale. He glanced at me and smiled a little.

“A tiring journey,” he said, “for both of us.”

I nodded. I was quiet and empty. Feeling the stir of understanding, I seemed to have no need to scrabble toward it. It would come.

A doorway slid open in the far wall; beyond lay a small, dimly lit room. Rarm’s tall figure intercepted the light. He beckoned to me, and I went into the room without trepidation. He followed me, and the doors softly shut.

There was a silence between us. Finally I said: “Strange to recall the experience of birth. The first struggle which we all forget.”

“Your birth,” he said, “is unimportant. Have you unearthed your own secret?”

“Yes, I believe so.”

“Then tell me,” he said.

“It seems laughable,” I said, still not wanting to say the thing aloud.

“As important as finding it is the need for you to admit it,” he said. “Now tell me, as you see it, what has happened to you.”

I sat on a couch which came to me from the wall. I looked at my own hands, calm, white, slightly open in my lap.

“Darak, Vazkor, and you, Rarm Zavid, I can see that much,” I said softly. “You bear only a superficial resemblance to each other; there is none of the great likeness I have imagined linked each of you to the last. I see also whose likeness began my obsession with the tall dark narrow-eyed man—Sekish, whose face came in my first dreams after I had left the mountain. Sekish, who terrified and degraded me, who made me aware of my evil and unworthiness to live. I see, too, why I blocked my thoughts against the four years of my past, and particularly against the last halfyear of death and misery. Except that I remembered, Rarm, far too well—without remembering.”

“You were strong,” he said. “By some miracle you escaped the Plague, and grew into a woman as you lay in the airless cell for sixteen years. The airless cell. Unbreathing, you could only lie in a coma. Do you know now what woke you?”

“I think—I am not sure.”

“In the last days of the Plague,” he said, “the volcano roused itself; rock fell and blocked the air funnels.

For the sixteen years of your coma the volcano grumbled and trembled, preparing itself for an eruption.

On the last day, the walls of the mountain cracked open under the pressure of built-up gases inside.

Through the cracks, a little new air filtered in to you. You began to breathe. After a time, in the last hours before the eruption, you woke.”

“And so,” I said, “and so my waking did not create the eruption as part of the curse and punishment I must suffer for going out of the mountain. It was the eruption which caused my waking.”

“Your curse and punishment,” he repeated. “Yet you understand now, don’t you, who cursed you. and who punished you? You understand finally the nature of Karrakaz?”

“Karrakaz was my invention. I invested the offering bowls of the Lost with the Power of my self-terror.

There has never been an Evil One, a Soulless One, created from the wickedness of my people, returning to destroy them. I feared my Power, because Sekish had made me fear it, and I strove with every ounce of my unconscious will to prevent myself achieving it.”

“And that,” he said, “was the ridiculous irony behind everything that has happened to you. Because you woke with Power, with your full Power. The voice which you imagined spoke out of the offering bowl told you that you could never repossess your greatness until you found your soul-kin of green jade—the quest, the hopeless quest. If you had continued to believe and follow that instruction, you need never have discovered your own strength: the demands of Sekish would have been obeyed. So you fought yourself. Despite your obvious gifts—your ability to understand any manner of speech by a form of telepathy, your ability to cure the most terminal diseases—you made excuses for your achievements—the crowd healed itself—and dreamed of the Jade you could never find. Darak came, and you buried yourself alive in his way of living, regretting your lost quest, but unable to break free. In the ravine camp you went to the leaning stones because you sensed their aura, the evil feel to them because of the superstitions of the bandits. It fitted ideally into the picture you had built of yourself. On the South Road empathy, another part of your Power, asserted itself. You saw things that had happened there in the past, you saw the Lost, but you saw through the eyes of their human slaves, to such an extent that you, also, confused levitation with flight. And then, Kee-ool. You had threatened yourself with lightning at the Road Gate, but the ruin still drew you.”

He paused, prompting me with his silence.

I said dutifully, “I was repelled and attracted at the same time, as I have been repelled by and attracted to all places I could invest with the character of Karrakaz. I wanted to destroy myself, and at the same time, suffocated by Darak’s personality, I also longed to link with my own self—the severed part of me which I had made a demon.”

“Hence the bargain with Karrakaz,” he said, “and then your attempt to kill Darak with the falling stone, when he shook you out of your trance.”

“And the earth tremor, the flying stones that killed Kel and so many other men—was I the cause of that?”

“Yes. With the Power in you that you didn’t even understand you had. You raised the storm to destroy Darak and the life you had with him, to destroy yourself if you could.”

“But I was afraid,” I said.

“You had a death-wish and a wish to live,” he said. “That’s common to all men. Unfortunately you had the power to organize both.”

“And Darak’s death in Ankurum. Did I make it happen?”

“I don’t think so,” he said, and I wanted to believe him. “You were convinced there was a curse on you, that there could be no happiness for you or for anyone you loved. That conviction communicated itself both to Darak and Vazkor, but not directly through you, because you never spoke to them of it.”

But I recalled how I had said to Darak, “To see my face is death to you.”

I wanted to believe him. I thrust the memory of Darak away, and the memory of Asutoo, the warrior I had hypnotized and murdered for revenge.

“The Mountain Ring,” I said, “and Uasti. My mental strength grew because of her. I thought she was teaching me new things, instead of releasing abilities I already possessed.”

“Uasti was a good teacher,” he said. “She made you look a little way into yourself, see what you could become. She might have taught you restraint, if she’d lived.”

“But she died. I ruled the wagoners, and crossed the Water. I was killed, and healed, and lived, and reached Ezlann. And Vazkor.”

“Vazkor,” Rarm said. “One of your worst teachers. In order to match him, you grew like him. You achieved the hubris Sekish had made you fear for yourself. And even before Ezlann, you killed the wagoners on the road.”

“I have always thought,” I said, “their death was my worst crime, even out of all the crimes and cruelties I committed.”

“Don’t judge yourself,” he said. “None of us are ever good at it. I think, at that time, to yourself you were already a goddess. Before, you had always thought you could die, yet you rose from the grave—only gods do that. In the City you unconsciously exerted influence to draw three guards to you—as you had unwittingly done in the bandits’ camp.”

“Because part of me recalled the three guards in the tomb paintings, the symbol of Temporal Power. As I recalled the symbolic knife, and thought it could kill me.”

“Exactly,” he said.

“In Ezlann and the Cities, the flame I called Karrakaz was still. It never troubled me. And in Belhannor, to raise the storm, I made a union with the flame—”

“In the first place, the flame left you alone because you were finally too strong—too strong even for the self-terror Sekish had given you. You’d faced yourself, you had said: ‘I am everything I was afraid to be. There’s no help for what I am. I can do nothing about it. Therefore I shall enjoy and reap benefit from my superior status, and crush the ants under my heel.’ In Belhannor there was no link—you simply drew on the extra reserves of Power now open to you without their self-inflicted barriers. You were Uastis, the Risen One, the goddess of White Desert. And finally you set your strength against Vazkor—in contempt, because he had no right to share your hubris.”

“I killed him,” I whispered to my white, half-opened hands.

“You killed him,” Rarm repeated. “And then you lay down to die under the tower.”

“And when the tribe found me my Power was gone. I could not even understand their tongue, let alone kill their seer.”

“Which was your final punishment against yourself. You had seen yourself achieve Power. You had fulfilled Sekish’s assessment of you. So now you blocked your Powers totally, and let the cruelty of the tribe complete your chastisement. You suffered, but you needed and wanted to suffer. When you were treated as a useless woman, a fool and a slave, it was the action of the princes and princesses under the mountain, beating themselves into miserable humility. You left your child as much because it would hurt you, as because it was expedient. And finally you became an animal in the marshes, shut off from all rational contact with man.”

“Until the black tribe took me in,” I said.

“And the striving began again,” Rarm said. “The peace, and then the Book—one of those diaries of repentance you were given as a child—recalled your quest for the Jade. You went to the ruined cities on the shore, and there you found Karrakaz, as you knew you would, because part of your mind recognized the structure of a tomb, and where the offering cup would be.”

“I tried to destroy myself completely,” I said. “A sleep of death I had willed on myself. It was not a demon I fought, only myself. Yet, so terrible. So real to me. No surprise now that Fethlin was able to save me. The Power was directed only at me—until we reached the valley. Did I cause the earth quake there as at Kee-ool?”

“Yes. You’ve always been able to harness great elemental forces for your own suppression.”

“The dream,” I said, “the dark deserted city, and the red fire on the tongue of land in the bay. A pyre,” I said. “The Plague had come for them too. And then the lizard. And then, on the beach, the shadow of the ship, and the beam of light—”

“You brought us down,” he said, “and you used the computer to kill the lizard. One of your few actions of self preservation.” “Why?”

“Perhaps,” he said, smiling, “perhaps in some way you knew all this would follow. You have, after all, the gift of foreknowledge also.” There was another little silence between us in the room.

He said, “All your Powers have returned now. For example, we’ve communicated all this time with no trouble.”

“The wrist-band,” I said. But when I looked down the green light did not sparkle. I drew it from my wrist. I said, “I understand now, but I am not complete. I have had one year of life since my childhood.

But I made certain that when I was reborn, I would be born dead.”

He rose.

“You’re still dead,” he said to me, and I understood him very well. He came and lifted me until I stood facing him. “You haven’t yet found the Jade.”

I turned away.

“Of that last thing, I am afraid.”

“You know the answer. As a child you knew. As a woman, you made yourself forget. There’s only one way for you to be free.”

With a slight breath of sound, the silvery ice of a mirror slid from the wall in front of us. It stood before me like an invulnerable guard, blocking my last way of escape. In it I saw our reflections, a dark man, a pale woman with a covered emptiness of a face.

“Before I took you to the computer to learn the truth of all this,” he said, “the part of you which you called Karrakaz paralyzed and blinded you to prevent your going. Now you’ve destroyed that assassin, and there’s no longer any way you can hide from reality.” He paused. He set me in front of him, before the gleaming cruel mirror. “Take off the mask,” he said.

My hands rose a little way, faltered, fell back.

He held me still.

“Take off the mask.”

My hands moved to my neck, upward to my hairline where the black forehead of the shireen ended. My hands froze and stiffened and would not do anything else.

“I cannot,” I said. “The ugliness—like a beast—”

“The Jade,” he said. “The Jade.”

“Yes,” I said. I screamed at the reflection as if it now were my enemy. I ripped and tore the shireen free of my skin, and my skin breathed, the air struck like snow on the flesh of my face. But I could not bear to look at what gaped before me. I covered my face with my hands.

I was crouching low against the floor, one arm over my head, my chin pressed down against my breasts.

“No,” he said. Kneeling behind me, he peeled my fingers from my face, and when I replaced them with my other hand, he took that away also. He held my hands to my sides. His face was against mine as I tried to bury it in my breast. “Look up,” he said. “Look up.” There was something in his voice—part laughter, part bitter sadness. I raised my head a little way, though not far enough to see. “Look up,” he said to me. Gently he put his hand under my chin and lifted it, and now I looked into the mirror.

I saw then what the villagers had seen when I came to after the volcano’s first anger. I saw what Darak had seen by the lake, and later in the half-darkness, and after that through the nights and dawns of our privacy together. I saw what Uasti had seen, what Vazkor had seen and flinched at, what Kotta had visualized in the tent on Snake’s Road. I saw what Rarm saw as he kneeled behind me.

And I saw what it was that made them afraid, or silent, and it was not what I had thought.

It was because I was beautiful. More beautiful than the best of human beauty, more beautiful than a beauty which can be understood, and because it was not a beauty which is of men, though of their planet, the beauty which had been, like Power, the birthright of the Lost.

Slowly, with infinite care, I touched my face, the flawless whiteness, the planes and curves like the map of some undiscovered landscape in a dream. My fingers brushed the mouth, lightly, the forehead, the long, long diamonds of eyes, which are, of all the differences, perhaps the most different from the human.

I stared at myself, and felt no hubris at all, because it seemed, will always seem, that this is not my face, I, who was cursed with great ugliness.

“Now you understand.” Rarm said to me. “It was the last cut against yourself to become convinced of your own hideousness. You held to it and nurtured it, and even identified with the devil goddess of Orash in your determination to be accursed. And it never occurred to you that perhaps you saw a false image under the mountain.” With one hand he reached out, and his forefinger lay across my forehead, pointing to that triangle of soft green light above and between my eyes. “And there is your soul-kin, the green Jade. Inserted under the skin, as with all your race, a few hours after birth, when the child sleeps. How hopeless you made your quest, searching your world for what you already carried inside you.” His hand moved away, softly touching my hair. “The third eye of the nameless Princess of the Lost. Who has, after all, a name which she now remembers.”

“Yes,” I said.

Kneeling before the bowl of offering, I had whispered it as all who knelt there whispered their names, before beginning the chant of contrition. I had whispered it so often there, it had become the symbol of the bowl, and the symbol of all I feared in myself. But no longer fear, and no longer separation.

“I know my name,” I said to him. “My name is Karrakaz.”

6

So, in the black void of space, in the silver star, I let go the shackles and became myself. And knowing now, able to see beyond myself, I saw that I must leave the ship, and begin again to live in the world of men as I knew them. Not for me the technical power and splendor of the planets which had bred men like Rarm Zavid. My own civilization had gone far in its advancement before pride and stupidity and the curse of men had finished it. But it had traveled a different road from the road which had produced the hollow star. There could be a meeting, but no union. There was no link to hold the pieces of our alien lives as one.

He would not tell me what he had risked to help me. Neither would Ciorden speak of it, but I think it had been much. The men of his ship were anxious to see me go, and to be away back to their home worlds, where men of their culture would judge Rarm for what he had done, his interference in the ways of our world, his delay and his involvement. I could do nothing. Except let him go in peace, trusting his own integrity and intelligence, his own knowledge of what he went to.

And I did not want to let him go. I did not want to lose him in life as I had lost Darak and Asren and Vazkor in death. Nor did he wish to leave me, this much I knew.

Four days after I had come to the ship, it landed smoothly in a rocky valley high in the hills beyond the sea. A new land, yet the same as the land where I had dragged through my year of life. Summer heat droned in the valley, over the tumble of green-edged boulders. No human habitation showed itself for miles. Three or four wild sheep ran from our coming, and I knew that silence would be there, that silence of fear for the unknown thing.

I stood in the glassy room among the pillars, staring at the valley through a viewing screen in the wall.

Ciorden had come, and kissed my hand, reminding me again of the notaries of Ezlann or Za. I had thanked him, and smiled at the awe which stole onto his face as he looked at me. It was foolish for him to be taken aback by what he had helped liberate. We both knew it, but it was there all the same. After Ciorden I knew that Rarm would come. And when he came at last, I realized fully that after this I should not see him any more. The tie that had held me to Sekish was dissolved. There was no fascinated hatred in my love for this man, the man who had given me myself.

“I must take the ship up very soon,” he said. “I’ve overstayed my leave here.”

“I understand,” I said.

“And you’ll take nothing with you?”

“No, Rarm, only this one dress. Before the winter comes I shall have shelter of some sort, and, as we both know now, I do not need food at all, only what I draw from the air as I breathe. It will be a hard lesson for me to relearn, that lost habit, but it can be done, and the sooner I begin, the better.”

“I wish this didn’t have to be the finish of it,” he said quietly. “I don’t want to leave you.”

“Nor I you,” I said, “but there is no other way for us.”

“No, there isn’t any other way.”

It seemed I had been coming toward him from my past all the years I traveled; and now that we met and touched, the moment was achieved—and ended.

He came to me then, and kissed me, intently, yet without particular passion. There was no point in any passion or desire between us. It was too late for us, more than that, there had never been a time for us, would never be. It was the first and last meeting, and now there was almost nothing else to say or do.

Together we walked to the lock of the ship and the hatchway, which gave onto the valley. It opened for me, slowly, lustily, as if reluctant.

“Ciorden would say his computer didn’t want you to go,” Rarm said.

I looked outward, and the world yawned before me like the empty void which had hung about the ship.

I put my hand in his a moment, then I looked away from him, into the valley. The hatchway slid toward the ground. I stepped out. I did not look back. I walked over the rocks and the rough mosses. Small pink flowers stood up like a child’s vision of stars embroidered on the grass.

I did not look back at him, nor at the ship.

When I reached the crest of the valley, I heard the thin high moan start up behind me. I did not turn. I imagined the oval silver thing lifting, gleaming, from the burned earth, lifting, lifting, high into the blue summer sky, dwindling, changing to a tiny silver light, vanishing, going away and away.

The sound eased and melted into the air. The silence all around me stirred a little. First a cricket creaking, next a flutter of bird wings as a brown pigeon circled over the rocks. Soon a thousand small twitters, rustlings, scutterings. Fear had gone.

Over the crest the world was green, running down toward trees and the far-off glitter of water. Toward pastures, too, perhaps, and toward people. Toward villages and towns and cities, which held their own scattered remembrance of the Lost, where there might be stone bowls burning flame, and golden books with faded leaves whose guilt and fearful hope of surviving the Plague had given rise to a legend of a second coming of gods.

A hot breeze burned on my naked face, lifted strands of my hair.

I am alone. No one stands beside me, I have no Dark Prince to ride in my chariot, to walk with me, to hold me to him. I have no one. And yet. I have myself at last, I have myself. And to me, at this time, it seems enough. It seems more, much more, than enough.