The Fall Of Atlantis

Chapter Eleven: VISIONS

I

When Deoris failed to return, Domaris slowly grew anxious, and finally went in search of her sister—a search that was fruitless. The shadows stretched into long, gaunt corpses, and still she sought; her anxiety mounted to apprehension, and then to terror. The words Deoris had flung at her in anger years ago returned to her, a thundering echo in her mind: On the day I know myself with child, I will fling myself into the sea ...

At last, sick with fright, she went to the one person in all the Temple precincts on whom Deoris now had the slightest claim, and implored his assistance. Reio-ta, far from laughing at her formless fears, took them with an apprehension that matched her own. Aided by his servants, they sought through the night, through the red and sullen firelight of the beaches, along the pathways and in the thickets at the edge of the enclosure. Near morning they found where she had fallen; a section of the wall had given way, and the two women lay half in, half out of the water. Karahama's head had been crushed by fallen stones, but the scarred, half-naked form of Deoris was so crumpled and twisted that for sickening minutes they believed that she, too, was lifeless.

They carried her to a fisherman's hut near the tide-mark, and there, by smoldering candlelight, with no aid save the unskilled hands of Domaris's slave-girl, was born Eilantha, whose name had been written that same day upon the rolls of the Temple. A tiny, delicately-formed girl-child, thrust two months too soon into an unwelcoming world, she was so frail that Domaris dared not hope for her survival. She wrapped the delicate bud of life in her veil and laid it inside her robes against her own breast, in the desperate hope that the warmth would revive it. She sat there weeping, in reborn grief for her own lost child, while the slave-girl tended Deoris and aided Reio-ta to set the broken arm.

After a time the infant stirred and began feebly to wail again, and the thin sound roused Deoris. Domaris moved swiftly as she stirred, and bent over her.

"Do not try to move your arm, Deoris; it is broken at the shoulder."

Deoris's words were less than a whisper. "What has happened? Where?" Then memory flooded back. "Oh! Karahama!"

"She is dead, Deoris," Domaris told her gently—and found herself wondering, in a remote way, whether Deoris had flung herself over the wall and Karahama had been killed in attempting to prevent it—whether they had simply fallen—or whether Karahama had thrust her sister over the wall. No one, not even Deoris was ever to know.

"How did you find me?" Deoris asked, without interest.

"Reio-ta helped me."

Deoris's eyes slipped wearily shut. "Why could he not ... attend to his own affairs ... this one last time?" she asked, and turned her face away. The child at Domaris's breast began its whimpering wail again, and Deoris's eyes flickered briefly open. "What is ... I don't ..."

Cautiously, Domaris lowered the infant toward her sister, but Deoris, after a momentary glimpse at the little creature, shut her eyes again. She felt no emotion except faint relief. The child was not a monster—and in the wrinkled, monkey-like face she could discern no resemblance whatever to Riveda.

"Take it away," she said tiredly, and slept.

Domaris looked down at the young mother, with despair in her face which lightened to a haunted tenderness. "Thy mother is tired and ill, little daughter," she murmured, and cradled the baby against her breasts. "I think she will love thee—when she knows thee."

But her steps and her voice dragged with exhaustion; her own strength was nearly gone. Domaris had never fully recovered from the brutal treatment she had received at the hands of the Black-robes; moreover, she dared not keep this a secret for long. Deoris was not, as far as Domaris could judge, in physical danger; the child had been born easily and so swiftly that there had been no time even to summon help. But she was suffering from exposure and shock.

Domaris did not know if she dared to take any further responsibility. With the baby still snuggled inside her robes, she sat down on a low stool, to watch and think... .

II

When Deoris awoke, she was alone. She lay unmoving, not asleep, but heavy with weariness and lassitude. Gradually, as the effect of the drugs began to weaken, the pain stole back, a slow pulsing of hurt through her torn and outraged body. Slowly, and with difficulty, she turned her head, and made out the dim outline or a basket of reeds, and in the basket something that kicked and whimpered fretfully. She thought dully that she would like to hold the child now, but she was too weak and weary to move.

What happened after that, Deoris never really knew. She seemed to lie half asleep through all that followed, her eyes open but unable to move, unable even to speak, gripped by nightmares in which there was no clue to what was real—and afterward there was no one who could or would tell her what really happened on that night after Riveda's child was born, in the little hut by the sea... .

It seemed that the sun was setting. The light lay red and pale on her face, and on the basket where the baby squirmed and squalled feebly. There was a heat-like fever in Deoris's hurt body, and it seemed to her that she moaned there for a long time, not loudly but desolately like a hurt child. The light turned into a sea of bloody fire, and the chela came into the room. His dark, wandering glance met hers ... He wore bizarrely unfamiliar clothing, girt with the symbols of a strange priesthood, and for a moment it seemed to be Micon who stood before her, but a gaunt, younger Micon, with unshaven face. His secret eyes rested on Deoris for a long time; then he went and poured water, bending, holding the cup to her parched lips and supporting her head so gently that there was no hurt. For an instant it seemed Riveda stood there, nimbused in a cloud of the roseate sunset, and he bent down and kissed her lips as he had done so rarely in her life; then the illusion was gone, and it was only the solemn young face of Reio-ta looking at her gravely as he replaced the cup.

He stood over her for a minute, his lips moving; but his voice seemed to fade out over incredible distances, and Deoris, wandering in the vague silences again, could not understand a word. At last he turned abruptly and went to the reed-basket, bending, lifting the baby in his arms. Deoris, still gripped by the static fingers of nightmare, watched as he wandered about the room, the child on his shoulder; then he approached again, and from the pallet where Deoris was lying he lifted a long loose blue shawl, woven and fringed deeply with knots—the garment of a Priestess of Caratra. In this he carefully wrapped the baby, and, carrying her clumsily in his hands, he went away.

The closing of the door jarred Deoris wholly awake, and she gasped; the room was lurid with the dying sunlight, but altogether empty of any living soul except herself. There was no sound or motion anywhere save the pounding of the waves and the crying of the wheeling gulls.

She lay still for a long time, while fever crawled in her veins and throbbed in her scarred breasts like a pulsing fire. The sun set in a bath of flames, and the darkness descended, folding thick wings of silence around her heart. After hours and hours, Elis (or was it Domaris?) came with a light, and Deoris gasped out her dream—but it sounded delirious even to her own ears, all gibberish and wild entreaties. And then there were eternities where Domaris (or Elis) bent over her, repeating endlessly, "Because you trust me ... you do trust me ... do this because you trust me ..." There was the nightmare pain in her broken arm, and fever burning through her veins, and the dream came again and again—and never once, except in her unquiet slumber, did she hear the crying of the small and monkey-like child who was Riveda's daughter.

She came fully to her senses one morning, finding herself in her old rooms in the Temple. The feverish madness was gone, and did not return.

Elis tended her night and day, as gently as Domaris might have; it was Elis who told her that Talkannon was dead, that Karahama was dead, that Domaris had sailed away weeks before for Atlantis, and that the chela had disappeared, no one knew where; and Elis told her, gently, that Riveda's child had died the same night it was born.

Whenever Deoris fell asleep she dreamed—and always the same dream: the dark hut where her child had been born, and she had been dragged unwillingly back from death by the chela, whose face was bloodied by the red sunlight as he carried away her child, wrapped in the bloodstained fragments of Karahama's priestly robes ... And so she came at last to believe that it had never happened. Everyone was very kind to her, as to a child orphaned, and for many years she did not even speak her sister's name.