The Ring Оf Fire. The Wolf Bell

TEN

The thin radiance of moonlight through fog made the street much too light, a diffused brightness. One couldn’t be sure whether there was clarity of vision or only the glittering haze masking things unseen. Zephy peered out of the alley. “Why couldn’t it be dark.”

“It wouldn’t be dark so close to Fire Scourge,” Meatha whispered reasonably. The full moons behind the fog were like two lamps in their brilliance. Meatha shifted deeper into the shoulder-narrow alley, pressing against Zephy who was, in turn, pressed against the damp stone.

The bright fog would surely set the wagon off too plainly, though Zephy guessed it was better than the bare full moons shining down. The night was utterly silent; strange, after so much music. She felt as if an echo of music still vibrated, unheard. Meatha sighed, nervy with apprehension, then slipped out of the alley and away, a dark shape beside the wall disappearing at once into the fog. She would stand watch between Zephy and the square, prepared to whistle softly if anyone appeared in the street. It had taken Thorn a long time to teach them the whistle of the river-owl. Thorn would be in the square now. And Loke, with the bucks, would be watching from the north end of town. Even in the silence the wagon should not be heard, for the wheels and the horse’s hooves would be wrapped with rags.

Alone, Zephy felt very exposed, even in the narrow alley. She hardly dared breathe for listening. Once she thought she heard a door open softly. But it could have been inside a house. She tried to see deeper into the mist. If someone were standing across the street, would she see them? But of course there was no one; all Burgdeeth slept after the night of dancing. The dampness of the stone against which she was pressed chilled her. She stood away from the wall shivering, disliking the fog suddenly.

Among the coastal countries, Aybil and Farr, Pelli and Sangur, fog was said to be the breath of SkokeDirgOg, and men kept to their closed houses. How much superstition men lived by. If it were not for Tra. Hoppa, would she and Meatha be the same? Were they being as foolish now, just as believing of falsehood when they put their trust in Anchorstar as they were doing?

But to speak to Anchorstar, to speak without words, that was not superstition. That was real, something they had done themselves—or, Meatha had.

And did Meatha see truly? Or was her vision as warped as the Cloffi history of Ere? Was what she thought truth just another falsehood?

A faint hollow sound shook her, a ghost of a sound. Then almost at once the wagon was looming out of the fog, its muffled hoofbeats like blunt whispers, the horses warm-smelling; the wagon was nearly on top of her, the muffled wheels and rag-shod hooves sucking strangely at the damp street. For an instant Anchorstar’s face was above her, his eyes looking into hers, speaking a message she could not doubt; how could she ever have doubted him, the direct, honest warmth of his gaze that seemed to see right into her, to bare his own soul for her. Then he was gone, swallowed up. From the back of the wagon Thorn reached down to touch her cheek, then he too was gone; the wagon had disappeared, gone as if it had never been. No sound remained. Ahead in the fog, had Loke joined them? They must meet the river high above the last fields where the path was rough and stony; to use the lower road would have been foolish. She shivered at what tomorrow would bring. It seemed a wild plan, to slip out of Burgdeeth during the reaping. To stand before Anchorstar in a meeting that, Zephy felt, would change her life in ways that terrified her.

She slipped out into the street. Meatha would be finding her way home now. The fog made distances seem different; she quailed as something moved close by, then saw it was her own fog-distorted shadow against a door. She found her stairway and climbed it, lifting the door with all her strength to keep it from creaking. She climbed the two flights and the ladder, undressed in darkness, and was in bed at last. But she couldn’t sleep. She thought of Thorn’s green-eyed gaze, and Anchorstar’s dark, penetrating look, that were in some way alike. Both challenged and both comforted her. Then she dropped into sleep as suddenly as a stone drops into water.

*

The chanting of Prayer Morning woke her. She tried to slip back into sleep, felt as exhausted as if she had not slept at all. She pulled the covers up, but the Deacons’ voices raised in unison were so insistent that at last she rose. She washed and dressed in a stupor with the chanting annoying her. The demanding voices seemed to destroy what little privacy she had. Outside, the fog still shrouded Burgdeeth, veiling the houses below her. She scowled down at the fog-muffled street and thought about dumping her dirty washwater down on the Deacons’ righteous heads; and that shocking idea made her feel a good deal better.

At least she wouldn’t have to start breakfast, for Prayer Mornings meant fasting. Her stomach rumbled in protest and she was at once ravenous. She pulled on her cloak and went down; maybe she could slip a little bread from the sculler.

But Kearb-Mattus was there before her, rummaging. He didn’t fast; he didn’t go to services. She went out again, feeling irritable.

In the street the banners hung limp and pale as if the fog had robbed them of their colors. The wet cobbles were slippery; and people, coming out of their houses, paused and stared at the cloistered morning in annoyance. Zephy shivered and pulled her cloak tighter. She glanced back to see Mama coming out behind her, joining the Cobbler’s wife. She went on ahead, not wanting to talk to Mama.

The six red-robed Deacons, marching at the head of the straggling procession, had backs as straight as painon trees. Zephy tried to walk straighter and more in time with them, as was expected. As the procession entered the square, the fog shifted so the fog-veiled god seemed to lift, turning; seemed airborne then disappeared behind a heavy wash of mist.

It was strange that the Horses of Eresu were tolerated there with the gods. But what an odd question; why wouldn’t they be? They were the gods’ own consorts. Yet the Horses of Eresu were only mortal, as humans were. They were truly of Ere, and the gods were not. What were the gods, then? Did they become fully visible only at Waytheer as the Covenants taught? Was Eresu a place of two worlds, the heavenly one and the earthly one overlapping? She could never understand how that could be. She felt half-asleep, yet questions were crowding into her head with sudden surprising strength. As if, while she slept, questions had been pulled forth from the very depths of herself, those questions that troubled her most.

The Deacons had knelt before the Temple steps; behind them the procession knelt, too, as the Landmaster, broad under his swirl of red silk, made the entry signs across the door. Zephy bowed her head in quick submission. But she felt as rebellious at the ceremony as she had ever been in her life.

The red robes were bright against the white stone as the Deacons rose and climbed the stair. Four Deacons entered the Temple behind the Landmaster. The two youngest stood beside the entryway, their sheaves of whitebarley raised, and began to say the blessing in monotonous tones as the citizens of Burgdeeth filed by to enter the holy place.

Inside, the women and girls turned to one side, and the men and boys to the other. The six Deacons knelt before the carven stone dais on which the Landmaster stood with his hands crossed over his shoulders to represent his nakedness without wings. The citizens of Burgdeeth bent their heads in holy submission. The candles, placed in niches along the wall, sent long shadows of the Landmaster and Deacons across the heads of the kneeling people. Zephy peered up under her lashes, searching for Meatha, but she could not see her, and became uneasy. Had Meatha gotten home unseen last night?

This Worship of the First Dawn, just as the Worship of the Last Day, laid upon Burgdeeth protection against the wrath of the Luff’Eresi for all the following year. It began the five days of ceremonies that insured good crops and fertility and protected all who were sincere against hunger and against the evils of avarice and pride and curiosity.

The prayers were rising now, “Oh bless us, humble we are. Bless us, weak we are and afraid.” She intoned the words without feeling—yet with a real prayer deep in her heart: Let them be safe, let Thorn and Anchorstar be safe . . . “And we bow our heads in submission, we kneel to the ground before you our gods who are not earthbound”—Let them be safe—”and we worship your sky and your land on which we are suffered to dwell . . .”

The grain and fruit were being offered now, lifted into the flame. Their burning smell began to fill the Temple. Zephy choked with its bitter sweetness, tried not to cough, and knew the eyes of the Deacons were on her. She felt her face go red with humiliation as people glanced sideways.

Across the aisle the men of Burgdeeth, row after row of grown men, were bowing and kneeling submissively, their lips moving in prayer. Zephy could not picture Anchorstar behaving so. And the few times she had seen Thorn and Loke come to Temple their heads had bent very slightly, and their backs, when they knelt, were straight as zayn trees so you could see no hint of submission.

As if something in her head had saved forgotten memories to fling at her now, a dozen scenes came back to Zephy suddenly and sharply. She was standing in the Candler’s watching him pour hot wax into molds all the same shape, the same size. Couldn’t they be different sizes, she asked him. Could you make a square candle? If you put in berry juice would it make the wax red?

“Candles’ve always been made this way; why’d you want any other? When one burns down you just pluck another on top. If you had all different sizes and shapes, how’d they fit the holders? And who ever heard of square candles? Talk like that don’t please the Deacons none.” He had stared down at her coldly from behind his work table.

And the Shoemaker. All Burgdeeth’s shoes were the same. Men’s. Women’s. Children’s. Boots the same only taller. There must be some other way for shoes to look.

“What way would you have ’em? Soles on the top and the lacing underneath?” The Shoemaker had guffawed and Zephy had turned away rigid with anger. Couldn’t anyone see what she meant?

She thought of last night, so the memory of the music caught her up, came into her head more real than the Temple prayers; she closed her eyes and felt the warmth of Thorn’s closeness, felt his hands holding hers.

The offering was flaming to blackness. The Deacons knelt and bent their heads until their foreheads touched the dais. Behind them, the citizens of Burgdeeth knelt as one.

At last the offering was ashes, the flame dead, the Temple gray with smoke. The Deacon’s voices rose in a cry like ferret-dogs as the Seven Prayers of the First Day began. This depressed Zephy, all the Five Days of Worship depressed her—until the Prayers of the Last Night. She could suffer the rest for that.

On the Last Night, after the kneeling, after the terrible shrill whining of the Deacons, the worshippers would rise and march out of the Temple, each carrying a torch lit from the blessed vessel, would march into the town square and around the great statue. Their faces would be turned upward toward the night sky and the stars, toward Waytheer and the full moons. Toward the gods. The Deacons would raise their voices in a gentler litany then, in a song of true prayer. And maybe, in the sky, dark shapes might move, windborne, across the faces of the moons.

Now, the sudden stirring around her brought Zephy back to the present as the worshippers rose. As they turned toward the door, she saw Meatha where she had been sitting behind her; and Burgdeeth’s citizens filed out into the bright morning and headed directly for the fields.

“Do you think the wagon got through all right?” Zephy breathed faintly as she caught up with Meatha.

“They are safe in Dunoon,” Meatha whispered without hesitation. Then she would say no more, nor look at Zephy, as if she were wrapped in some private cocoon of emotion she did not want to share.

The fog had burned away and the sun was coming as they took up their scythes and began to cut the heavy whitebarley stalks, swinging in loose rhythm with the other women and girls who formed a long line on either side of them. Then, as the slower reapers dropped back the line began to waver. Behind them came the wagon pulled by six donkeys and driven by a young girl, accompanied by two loaders: older women with strong backs who could throw the sheaves in such a skilled way that the grain was not disturbed.

The sun was well above the hills before there were changes in the harvest line, a girl dropping out because of illness, three coming late to join them after nursing babies—now two more missing might not be noticed by the patrolling Deacons. After all, three fields were being cut besides the main field where the men were working. As the harvesters cut to the edge of the woods that bordered the river, then turned back upon a new row, straggling, one or two stopping to rest, Zephy and Meatha were there one moment and gone the next, slipping through the underbrush, their hearts pounding.

They lay for a long time in the riverbank, and once a Deacon’s horse passed so close they didn’t dare breathe. But if they were discovered here, it would only be a matter of idling, of cooling off. Chastisement, a beating. At last, when they heard no other sound, no breaking branches, no voice calling out, they rose and started up the river.

They kept as well hidden as they could, staying close to the painon trees that lined the fields on their right, then to the cicaba grove, almost overpowered by the honey scent of the cicaba. At the end of the grove, Burgdeeth would end too, and the wild fields begin, the forbidden fields where no one was allowed save those on sanctioned business for Burgdeeth: the meat cart, the ice wagons, the loads of bittleleaf. They could still hear, faintly, the sounds of the threshing, the hush, hush of the scythes and the muttering of women’s voices, the occasional calls or laughter. They walked hunched over instinctively, though the cicaba trees were dense and shielding.

Thorn won’t be there, Zephy thought. He won’t be waiting.

But when they reached the end of the cicaba grove he was there, leaning idly against a tree trunk, a pile of forbidden cicaba gleaming red at his feet. His trousers were rolled to his knees, and his damp clothes clung to him as if he had pulled them on hastily after swimming. “Took you long enough,” he said lightly.

“Temple . . .” Zephy began, and felt herself go weak at his presence.

He grinned, and handed Zephy a cicaba, and one to Meatha. They sat eating the fruit messily, as casual about it—though Zephy and Meatha had never tasted cicaba—as if they had been the Landmaster’s own family. The rind was sharp-tasting, and the fruit inside as sweet as honey. It stained their mouths red so they would be hard put to deny their thievery, were they caught. We won’t be, Zephy thought. Not now, not with Thorn, we won’t.

Across the river, some vetchpea vines had gone wild and grown into tangles that climbed the painon trees and hung down in green curtains. Zephy stared, thinking someone might be watching from there, but Thorn shook his head. “I looked, there’s no one.” And when they went on at last, the hanging vetchpeas vanished quite soon as the river and path turned left.

Burgdeeth and the Landmaster’s fields were behind them now; the wild steep fields and back boulders rose toward the mountain, the river cutting swiftly down to pass them noisily. They were at the foot of the Ring of Fire; Zephy felt the strength of the land around her, felt its weight as it rose above her, the solidity of stone that seemed to have its roots deep in the world’s core. She turned and saw Burgdeeth, so small; then followed Thorn hastily as they slipped from boulder to boulder, staying in shadow. She remembered how stark a small figure, set against the pale grass of the mountain, could appear from below.

Last night at the Singing with the blackness driven back to the edges of the square, with the lamps and candles casting wildly dancing shadows across the stone houses and across the winged statue, with the fiddles and gaylutes and calmets making such a racket, she had felt that nothing could happen to Burgdeeth—or to them. Just as the blackness of night had been destroyed, so the fear of danger, the fear of war, had been put aside as if no harm could come as long as the music lasted. Now in the daylight she felt the reality of their danger once more, the reality of the Kubalese intent.

But such a mood could not last, for the lifting sun sent a clear light onto the mountain, picking out the silver river and, sharply, the black boulders that had been strewn over the land by the eruption of the volcanoes. When she thought of the volcanoes she felt the excitement that she felt in Temple sometimes, as if her thoughts were trying to break free, could almost free themselves. Had the river boiled dry in that terrible erupting heat? If it happened now, this minute, could they escape? She could imagine the lava pouring red and smoking over the little stone huts of Dunoon that perched far above them.

Thorn stared at her. “You’re frightened. Does the mountain do that?”

“Not the mountain. I was thinking of the volcanoes. Why did it happen? Really why?”

“Because there was fire in the mountain,” Thorn said, “a fire that had to come out just as surely as a boiling pot will shake off its lid.”

“But why then, just when Owdneet was attacked?”

He smiled. “Are you asking me if 1 believe in the Cloffi Books of Ere? Or are you asking if you do?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m asking.”

He looked at her, and she felt a weakness take her suddenly, a power between them that she could not resist, so that there was nothing real in all the world but Thorn and herself. His eyes darkened, he looked, and touched her hand—and then he turned away.

*

When they reached Dunoon, the stone huts were washed with sun, casting sharp shadows up the mountain. Zephy looked down to the valley, and it was as if she stood on the edge of the sky, so falling away was the land. The countries beyond Cloffi dropped until they merged into the far-off haze; space, infinite space fell away beneath her feet, and the wonder of it held her utterly so she stood staring until Meatha pulled her away, impatient to get on.

There were three orphaned fawns in the village tended by a small boy, and some women were grinding mawzee and wild grains while a young couple laid stone for a house. High behind Dunoon the herds of goats could be seen, and to the left a black cleft between two crags. It was into this cleft that Thorn would guide them. He led them across the village and up beside the river that had grown deeper and narrower as it flowed out from the cleft. The air was cold here. Small fish flashed in the cascading water, and once Meatha stopped and pointed, picking out a gray shape high above on the rocks.

“Wolves. They won’t bother in the daylight,” Thorn said. “There aren’t so many left now, not as there were when my father was young. Then they roamed the mountains in packs of fifty and more.”

“But how do you keep them away?” Meatha, like Zephy, felt a deep fear of the wolves of Dunoon.

“The bucks,” Thorn said. “Did you ever see a big buck goat charge a wolf? With five or six together, a pack doesn’t have a chance. That’s why we have several bucks to a herd. It took a good many generations to breed bucks that would tolerate sharing their does, but it was the only way for protection.”

“You could shut the herds up at night,” Meatha said.

“It was tried. They don’t like it, these goats want the night and the cold air and the moons to make good coats and strong breeding; they wasted away, shut in. That was why my ancestors came to this place in the beginning, because they thought the caves would be good protection and make their flocks safe.”

“It must have been frightening,” Zephy said, “with the volcanoes still smoking and the cinders falling.”

“Yes, they were afraid. The stories show it, the ones that have come down to us. But they came. They didn’t like the Herebian hot on their tails every minute. This was the only place the Herebian wouldn’t go at that time, on the site of the old city. There were fire ogres in the caves then, too. They must have been terrified sometimes—but it was better than the warring tribes.”

“Why was it better?” Zephy stared at him.

“Because the fire ogres and the wolves were only—well, it was their instinct to kill. But man—the Herebian, the Kubalese—theirs is a conquering out of lust. Humans don’t need to conquer and subjugate other humans. When they do, it’s a sickness.”

They came to the cleft; as they entered, the rocky cliffs closed around them and a cold breath like winter blew out of the dank, sunless fissure. The stream became black and narrow, silent flowing, and a weight seemed to press around them. Yellow moss grew up the sides of the stone walls, and something small scurried out from some rocks and disappeared ahead of them. Zephy glanced at Meatha—but Meatha was looking steadily ahead.