The White Serpent

11 True Slavery

She was in the womb of Yasmat, in the hand of fate.

She was in darkness, which rocked her to and fro.

But she discovered a discrepancy in the substance of the darkness, for half was water, half was not. Then the dark opened. There was a long horizontal shaft of burning red. It had the smell of salt and slime and pitch, yet also a freshness that dizzied her. She gulped at it thirstily, drinking the air, stretching out her hands to it—

Perhaps it was this movement, or some upsurge from beneath, but the great womb which had carried her turned suddenly over. In that instant of birth, as she fell into the sea, Panduv’s instinctive body flung itself away, leaping like a black dolphin in a wave of fire. She did not know why.

Immediately she struck the water she went down. An entirety of liquid closed over her head and pushed her under like a hard hand. Beneath her she glimpsed eternity. But above, the column-tree of the goddess from which she had been sprung, floating in two hollow halves still joined by hinges.

Raising her arms, Panduv dived toward the surface, broke the barrier of the sea into the red light, and pulled herself on to the floating column.

Her body was pulped and battered, as if she had been beaten by masters of torture. Every part of her ached and shrilled, even to her teeth and her loins. She rested face upward on the drum, her arms outspread, one hand dangling in the water. Within this cask of wood and paint and bronze, she had been catapulted through time and space, and fetched up here on an empty sea of blood.

In a blood-red dream, she lay there.

And, in the dream, she later beheld a purple moon come up, and against its flickering, the image of a ship.

When the hook of the grapple thudded home in the column-drum, Panduv did not raise herself. She did not care. •

The ship hauled her in slowly.

Panduv saw, beside her and beneath, in the water, the reflection of the ship, and then, above, the one tall sail. She was a vessel of Sh’alis, mostly Shansarian in design. Over the rail, the faces of men, smudged and staring, and pale of skin, looked down on their catch.

“A black fish of Vis!”

“Or maybe the fires burnt her that color, eh?”

As two of them began to climb down the swaying rope to her, Panduv considered slipping off the column, allowing herself to sink into the eternity under the sea. . . . The life-wish of the stadium-trained kept her where she was.

The men lifted her roughly and handed her up. She was wracked by pain and a sound escaped her.

“You’re alive then?”

“Oh, it’s alive.”

They dropped her on the deck.

The ship lord, the captain, was bending over her. A blond man with black eyes. Not good. Mixes were often the least tolerant.

“You escaped,” said the mix captain. “Ashara spared you, Inky. Are you off some other ship?”

She parted her lips to revile him. Perhaps then he would kill her at once. But no, the words would not come. Life-wish, or only that she had forgotten the means of speech.

The captain was indicating his cabin, an uncouth housing amid ships, and they took her there and cast her down by the man’s pallet.

Presently he entered, tying the leather door-flaps together, so they were alone.

“Don’t fear I’ll touch you,” said the mix ship-lord. “I wouldn’t dirty myself. But some of them might. They catch Star-itch and go with anything, with each other or the livestock. They’re muck. Ashara hear me, this trade is my curse. But you are my slave now. Do you understand?” He peered at her with his Vis eyes set in the filthy, unshaven white face. “Rest up,” he said. “Tonight you can eat, and then tell me who you are. You see,” he said, bending to her, “if you have a rich family, they’ll have to recompense me, to get you back.”

Panduv’s voice came.

“No family,” she said. She smiled a little, which it hurt her to do. “I am a slave of the city of Saardsinmey.”

“Not any more,” he said. “We went and took a look, after the storm passed. Nothing left of it, your bloody city.”

“An earthquake,” she said.

“And a great wave from the ocean. Your Rorn spat on your Saard rubbish-tip. So much for you.”

“And no ransom for you,” she said softly.

“So, I’ll sell you when we reach Iscah.”

When he left her again, she saw that the sky and the sea were still bright red. Although she had not fathomed what he said about Saardsinmey, an education seemed to be taking place in her mind. On some level, she knew perfectly everything that had happened as, unconscious and absent in the column, it had been rolled and tossed and borne her out to sea in the jaws of the returning ocean. A miraculous deliverance. Yet something also within herself told her that truly, the city was gone, and that therefore she, too, had died, everything of what she had been dashed from her. She had died once before, in Zakoris, on the day she was taken from her village. That first life lost she had never regretted. The life of an empress-slave—already she had passed far beyond it.

She wondered in that case what was left of herself, and who she now was. And searching through herself in the torpor of her physical shock and pain, she found at length the inner place, beyond sight and feeling and thought, and here she enclosed herself, with the peaceful sense that nothing actually mattered, what she had lost, or what had been destroyed, not even her nature and her name. Panduv slept.

The Owar was a ship from the harbors of northern Sh’alis, crewed by the lowest stuff of the northern quays. Sometime trader, and opportune pirate, she mooched about the seaways between the lesser ports of the Shansarian province and Vardish Zakoris, only sometimes venturing south to take in New Alisaar. On a rare commission to carry Alisaarian iron and breeding pigs to Iscah, the storm had caught Owar not far from shore. Blown about, she had seen fit, in the unholy sunset which followed, to detour farther southerly, on the lookout for others who had not managed the tempest. Easy booty was often come by after bad weather.

Nevertheless, a glance at the sea and land around the great southern city had turned Owar in her tracks. Later that day, sighting intact shipping, they had heard some of the news of a colossal earth tremor, a fire-mouth gaping in the sea off Saardsinmey, and a wave that had clipped the sky.

“The goddess lost her temper with them at last,” said Owar’s captain, an irreligious fellow.

That day’s sunset was as dire a proposition as the sunset that had attended the storm, and indeed the dawn between. One hour into it, the coast of New Alisaar fading on their right hand, they saw an object in the sea, and hauled it in. It was not much of a treasure, only some upset hollow thing with a black Vis woman on it. She might fetch a coin at Iscah, but frankly speaking, they had gone out of their way for nothing.

She was the captain’s handmaiden. He told her, if he had had a choice, she would not have been the fruit of it. Inky, he called her. He had an aversion to the touch of her skin, not realizing she was as allergic to his whiteness. To her arrogance and grace he was impervious, did not notice.

The aberration of the sunsets and the dawns grew less. As such evidence dispelled, the events of the quake and the wave became unreal for the men of Owar, and might not have happened. Only the Zakorian girl, who had witnessed less than they, remembered.

Her pride was integral, even though she was no longer Panduv. (Asked her true name by certain of the sailors, she replied, deliberately: Palmv. They found this as difficult on the tongue as once the name Panduv had been on her own, and clove to Inky.) With the pride, her well-tuned body had also kept its cravings, for good food and for exercise. That first was not available to her—or in fact to anyone on Owar, The second, being a possible enticement to the Star-peppery crew, she kept to a minimum, stretching and limbering in the bow, before the pen of pigs, when the last light and most of the ship’s activity subsided. Her hurts healed swiftly. Her body ached now only for use. She did not sleep well, and insomnia was so new to her, it did not much distress. In the corner of the cabin, she listened to the captain, snoring and grunting, and amused herself by facile plans for his murder. But he was her protector, she could not afford to get rid of him.

At Iscah she would be sold as a slave.

She neither doubted nor credited this.

She wore a ragged shirt the captain had given her. It had smelled unclean before she washed it in the sea. Beneath the shirt, about her neck, the economical knife stayed undetected in its closet of nacre. Would there come a time when after all she must use it, on another, or herself?

The non-physical core, wherein she habited to guide her body in the dance, to that place she went most often, out of the world. But otherwise she wondered sometimes if the battering in the drum had deprived her of sanity, she was so bland, she cared so little.

The ship came in at last to a shabby port of Iscah. News of Saardsinmey’s fall, garbled and spectacular, had already got up the coasts, filtered through Sh’alis on the way. Gossip was off-loaded with the pork and iron. The yellow mix sailors strutted through the town, cloaked in the power of Ashara-Anack, glaring down the dark Iscaians.

“Strip,” said the ship lord to Panduv. “You’re no eye-sore here. They’ll like you best that way. You can do your dancing for them. I’ve seen you at that. Not bad.”

Panduv stirred.

“I will not strip. I will not dance for you or for them.”

The man came and threatened her with his fist. He did not use it, not wanting to devalue her for the market.

Through the inner vision of Panduv there chased a line of scenes. That she might now kill this lout, that she might flee through the port. That she might find refuge or a living somewhere. But something restrained her. Iscah had no love, either, for Zakorians, who had plundered her when they were able, and were now accursed of Anack, a goddess recognized as dangerous.

Panduv said to the captain, “You’ll manage to sell me without putting me up naked or performing for them. They only want a slave to work, in a place like this.”

“Or for bed,” he added.

“Or that. So, let them pay you to see and get.”

He shrugged. “Undo your hair,” he said.

She had worn it plaited and bound on her head by a thong from the shirt. Now she thought he wanted her long-haired as an inducement. But when she obliged him, taking a blade, he cut off her hair just below her ears. “For the wigmakers,” he said, deigning to give her explanation.

The urge to kill him fell on her again like the wave upon the city, or, as she had imagined it. The one she had been was coming back to her.

The slave-market opened in the cool of the evening, when the more prosperous of the port idled down to the quay. To Panduv’s eyes these had themselves slight means enough, and would have passed for street-cleaners in the south. For the slaves, they were a dismal lot, and the captain turned cheerful, seeing his wares were so superior.

As they waited their turn for a rostrum, a brief procession parted the crowd. The captain and his second officer each spat on the dusty ground.

“Infidel priests!”

They were the votaries of Cah, identifiable by their robes of dark red and ocher. Foremost walked the Chief Priest, shaven hairless, even in the twilight with a boy to hold aloft a parasol of feathers over the bald head. A few paces behind this apparition came another, a fat woman swaddled in gauzes, but her lolloping breasts bare, her arms clattering with bangles. Unmistakably, the mistress of the temple brothel.

The captain discussed her demerits with his second. They laughed, but not too loudly now, for these idolatrous priests would be venerated here, and even the fat holy-girls thought worthy.

Torches were being lit. Presently it was Panduv’s turn to mount the rostrum.

She stood there, looking only into the sky beyond the muddle of lights and roofs. As the stars hardened, she heard her supposed virtues described. Her strength, the elasticity of her body, her sterling health.

A flash of brass attracted Panduv’s attention, and her eyes were drawn after all into the crowd. She saw the blubberous woman, her bracelets colliding, pointing at her. Panduv, too, had made out what the woman was. There had been, in the courts of Daigoth, a dancer or two from Iscah.

A priest at the back of the cluster was now approaching the rostrum. He was pointing, in turn, and offering money. The captain of Owar swore. There could be no haggling with a priest. He snatched the slave-seller’s arm and began to remonstrate, to no avail. The money had been accepted, the priest already turned away. Panduv realized she was bought by the local temple. And since no woman was permitted to serve Cah save as a prostitute, she had been purchased as a whore.

The temple crouched on a platform of stone. Black trees grew all about it, full of carrion birds by day that had smelled the offal from the altars. In a precinct behind, the whorehouse of Cah was situated.

The first night they drugged her with a beverage she was too thirsty not to drink. In the morning two young girls, already slopping with loose fat, brought dishes of food.

Panduv ate a little. She did not like the meal. Sweet sticky solid porridges and sweeter leaden breads.

Her abode was a cell, no larger than a latrine. It gave on a yard, or did so when the door was unlocked. She had already noticed temple guards oversaw the outside of the wall, and all the exits from the fane.

At noon, the fat girls came to remove the dishes, bringing more. Panduv asked, seeking to be plain in an approximation of the slur of Iscah, if she might answer the needs of nature. One of the girls, not speaking, indicated a lidded clay vessel in the corner. Not only, it seemed, was the cell the size of a latrine, it was to become one in fact.

Panduv ate no more of the food. She performed certain exercises, raising her feet to the wall, looping her body over—but the space was so confined it frustrated her, as the public jouncing restriction of Owar’s deck had done.

In the evening, another meal was served.

As dusk, star-flushed, began to fill the meshed grating in the door, the holy-mistress came to visit, audible before entry from her bracelets and her heavy, labored breath.

She stood in the doorway, perhaps fearful she would be wedged forever should she enter the narrow cell. She smelled of sweat and perfume and displeasure.

“You must eat,” the mistress said to Panduv.

Panduv smiled.

“To increase my weight?”

“Yes, that’s so. To make you appealing.”

“The men of your town like slugs for women.”

The mistress, understanding her, pursed her lips. She was coppery, dark for Iscah, though nothing to Panduv, with tough black hair much-braided and strung with beads. Under the slabs of her porridge-built flesh, an old beauty peered out bewildered. But her eyes were flint.

“Who is it you worship?” she inquired.

“Zarduk of fire. Daigoth of the warriors.”

“You are Zakr. Free, or under the whites?”

“Neither. I am a slave of Alisaar.”

“You know the name of Cah?”

“I have,” said Panduv, “no quarrel with Cah.”

“Cah has bought you. Cah requires you to serve. To serve, you must plumpen.”

“Your food nauseates me. I can’t eat it even if I would. Look at me. This body is used to exercise. I was a fire dancer.” (The mistress made a little hissing noise.) “Cage me this way,” said Panduv, reasonably, while her blood roared in her ears, “and I’ll become sick. You’ll waste your goddess’ money.”

“You will grow accustomed to the food. If you’d gone hungry since your birth, you would be glad of it, as the other girls. It is an untroubled life.”

Panduv could no longer restrain herself—the one she had been.

“Damn your untrouble, you wallowing sow! Am I to become a thing like you? I’ll starve. I’ll die rather. Take me out and kill me.”

She thought then of her beehive tomb she had given to the white Amanackire bitch. The tomb was swept to pieces by the wave, no doubt. And the witch-bitch had promised her long life, that would not need it—

But the fat woman had gone away, her attendant was closing the door.

Panduv upset the plates of sticky food. (And considered an instant the temple guards, but they were too many.) She stood on her hands against the wall. She blazed with futile anger and did everything so poorly she might as well not have attempted it, finally striking her head against an uneven place in the plaster. Then she beat her fists there, and cursed all things.

Later, she flung herself on the pallet. The truth, reality, had come to her now with a vengeance. She felt at last the end of Saardsinmey, the loss of what she had been, at first with raging agony, though this settled gradually through the void of night into a disbelieving despair.

She had no longing for Zakoris, Free or conquered, she had only wanted the Ahsaarian fame that to be called the Hanassian would have meant. The world was gone which had been hers nearly all her knowing life—but it had never been hers, she had been its. She belonged nowhere.

Near dawn she slept. She woke and found tears cold on her face. She could not recall the dream which had summoned them. But she considered, belonging nowhere, everywhere had some possibility for her.

She rose, and kicked the spilled dishes aside. She waited for the holy-girls.

Three of them duly arrived, opening the door with caution, looking at her nervously through the kohl on their eyelids.

“Tell the mistress,” said Panduv, “I’ll make a bargain. I’ll eat these messes if she will let me exercise in the yard. Otherwise, I will die.”

They gazed at her as if she had spoken in an unknown tongue. Panduv strode forward and thrust all three away from the door. Frightened of her, the caged leopard now loose, they did not resist, only lumbered quickly off, leaving her at large.

The yard was nothing much, a stone space contained by the precinct on two sides, and elsewhere with two high walls covered by yellowish plaster. A few inartistic doodlings in dull pink and gray did the office of patterning, and here and there a pot stood with a flowering shrub. Nevertheless, sunlight lay on the court, and the flowers, freshly watered, gave out a clear and hopeful smell.

Panduv did not linger. She did not know how much time she might have. She began at once to bend and unbend, to stretch and coil and brace herself. Flying into a series of slow cartwheels, she remembered a beating at Hanassor, at childhood’s end.

At length, she paused for breath, shaking her shorn hair from her face. And saw all the many rows of doorways about the court fat-full of holy-girls gaping at her, in astonishment. While, on a stair at the precinct’s west end, the mistress stood, chewing on a confection, her hard eyes intent.

Panduv grinned, and gave to her the reckless flamboyant salute of the stadium.

“Did they tell you my conditions?”

The mistress said nothing, but after a long stare, she returned up to her apartment, and drew the curtain over with a jangle of its brass-bracelet rings.

None came to usher Panduv back into prison, nor to chastise her.

As for the food, she must make do, eating a modicum, but clearing her plates into the lidded jar, then bearing it to the repository for waste matter. If she ate, or seemed to eat, she might earn alternative foodstuff, especially when they saw she did not after all “plumpen.” Panduv lowered herself like a black snake, lifted her feet high, and stalked over the yard on her hands.

By day, when not on duty on the couches over at the temple side of the precinct, the girls would loll about the inner courtyard. Most of them rose late, particularly after a day of service, and the heat of noon generally sent them to a second sleep indoors. Sometimes they employed themselves with sewing, the stringing of beads, or in elaborately arranging their hair. Bowls of candies were continually brought them by the five or six girl children already dedicated; when of age, they, too, were destined for Cah.

In the evening when the temperature lessened, just before the last meal, crickets whirred in the shrubs and the bushes over the wall. The shadows of birds crossed the yard, and the holy-girls often became animated. They lent each other jewelry, put flowers into their coiffures, chattered. They even compared their patrons disparagingly. Cah valued the male ability to give pleasure and so, since this talent was usually absent, her harlots were at liberty to complain. Zastis was the best and worst. The men were in such a hurry, but lust inherent in all and ultimately able to fulfill itself, if perhaps only at the tenth customer.

Panduv, accustomed to the female talk of the stadium-girls’ hall, and that in limited quantity, was offended by these costive dialogues.

Nevertheless, she went on with her exercise about the yard, aware that the harlots watched her, openly or under their lids, sullen yet fascinated. In a universe where men were imposed, like the weather, a woman who exhibited the masculine qualities of physical freedom and strength, arrogance and swagger, was an object of awe.

There was one girl whom it suited to be big. Though among the heaviest in the precinct, her large body was firm and she moved with complete gracefulness, looking light as down. Her skin had a luster on it, her huge eyes, on the rare occasions you might meet them, were intelligent. But for two side-plaits ending each in a brass bell, denoting Cah’s service, she wore her hair in a beautiful rippling cloud. She was called Selleb.

Selleb was not idle, like the others. In a room beneath the mistress’ apartment was a loom with posts, and here she worked away with her feet and her smooth arms, weaving cloth for the temple’s winter garments.

Nor, seeing the black leopard enter the loom-chamber, did Selleb stop weaving.

Panduv stood close to Selleb and touched the shining cloud.

“What tresses. The slaver who cut off my hair would have been wild for these.”

“When I was brought here,” said Selleb placidly, still tending the loom, “my father shore me, too.”

“Were you sorry to come to this place?”

“No,” said Selleb, “I was starved, at my father’s farm. I was born a fleshy child, so they thought they could feed me on crusts and air. My belly was always cramped from hunger.”

“Well, you’ve mended that,” said Panduv, and slipped her lean hand down Selleb’s succulent shoulder.

Selleb continued to weave.

“But this food,” said Panduv, “isn’t what I need. You see, I’m as skinny as ever.”

Selleb smiled, but said nothing.

Panduv raised her brows.

“Meat,” said Panduv, “and fruit.”

“Every ten days,” said Selleb, “there’s a dish of meat for us. Fresh fruit may be bought, but the best way is to ask a patron who is regular with you.”

“Being too thin to please,” said Panduv cryptically, “I have as yet no patrons. You, however, delicious one, must have many who prefer your mattress.”

Selleb smiled again.

Panduv ran her arm about Selleb’s waist, or at least as far as her arm would reach. Leaning to Selleb’s ear, Panduv whispered, “But I must have more meat, too. Is there a chance—something from the altars. I’ll have it raw if I must.”

“There is a chance, Panoov,” said Selleb; she rearranged the Zakorian’s name better than the others who had learned it. “Is there to be a return for helping you?”

“I hesitate.”

Selleb laughed softly.

Panduv said, “In Alisaar, I learnt several arts of love. I might teach them to you, if you were agreeable. You could then bring them to your service of Cah, to increase your enjoyment and that of your patrons, and so invite the goddess’ approval.”

The mistress entered the cell of the High Priest and kneeled on the floor, puffing. He sat imperious in his chair until she had got the breath to say: “Leave to speak. High One.”

“Do so.”

“High One, you may recall an unworthy woman I, in my inferior fashion, chose for the mattresses of Cah.”

“The black Zakr.”

“As you say, High One. There’s some difficulty.” The High One waited. The mistress labored, finding her kneeling posture also difficult. “She seems to eat, but never gains weight. Probably she is throwing out her food, or voiding it. In the normal way I’d discipline the girl and force her to swallow her meals before me. But she has been a dancer in Alisaar. It seems she knows tricks for the carnal act and has imparted them to the girls, or to one at least, so that the patrons receive benefit. It’s talked of. What shall I do. High One?”

The High Priest pressed his fingers to his shaven chin and looked long and blackly at the wheezing brothel-keeper of Cah.

He spoke.

“Nowhere, woman, in the creed of the goddess, is it suggested that either partner should gain pleasure but in the usual way. The sophistries of Alisaars are their own. Certainly, you chose poorly among the slaves. This Palmv isn’t docile, and forgets the proper place of the female. She can’t do any good with the girls. I believe we must be rid of her. At the new moon, we’ll sell her for menial work in the port.”

The mistress bowed, rose, was breathless.

“One further matter,” said the High Priest. “A Watcher is coming from the capital. There’s nothing here that may not be seen and reported on to the Mother Temple. But he will arrive before Zastis is done. Make sure your charges are groomed and at their best, he may want use of some of them.”

Among the girls of Cah, once the news of the Watcher had been given them, there began some excitement. Such a priest was of importance, but often young—since the traveling required of him might be taxing. He went about from place to place, inspecting the fanes of the goddess, seeing the rituals were correctly kept, and the other temple business, such as slaughtering and usury, properly in hand. Revenues were sent from all the towns and larger villages of Iscah to the Mother Temple in Iscah’s capital, but it was a haphazard affair. The land was not known for its riches, one did not expect too much blood from a stone.

“There has been no Watcher here for three generations,” the girls told each other, their sleepy sulky voices brighter and more wakeful. They ate heartily, washed and rubbed and oiled their bodies and their hair continuously, lying out in the sunlight like sleek fat cats with glistening fur.

“So he’s powerful, this priest?” said Panduv to Selleb, as they lay side by side at midnight.

“You’re wondering what can be made of that,” murmured Selleb.

“And you are too clever,” said Panduv. “Why aren’t you a porridge-brain like the others?”

“I have heard, he must go on a journey up into the mountains. A town or village there has come to the attention of the Mother Temple. I’ve heard, he likes women very much.”

“Then he’ll likely have women with him, don’t you think?”

“No. He tired of them and left them or sold them for funds.”

“Yes,” said Panduv, “I, too, have used lovers casually.”

Arud, Cah’s Watcher, entered a minor port of Iscah to which his duty had taken him, in the last phase of Zastis, and the heat of late afternoon. He had been three days on winding trails, in the dust, without a woman or a bath. He was saddle-stiff, since the munificence of the capital ran to zeebas, sore from the stings of insects, red-eyed and ill-tempered. His mood was not eased, moreover, by knowing that the road from this wretched haven would be longer, drier, dustier and more difficult, and end at an anthill even less prepossessing.

The port—shoddy—did not attract Arud’s attention. His mount clumped through, the four outriders and baggage trundling after, while the people in the streets made way and offered pious obeisance. The temple, its pillars unpainted and crows sitting in the trees around, was much as he had expected. He had seen five such already on his trek.

The High Priest came out to greet Arud, then there followed a ceremony in the temple, before the High Altar. (Arud would gladly have dispensed with it, but one could not insult Cah.) Thereafter a room was provided in which to steam, and a tepid sluice, and a couch in an odd triangular chamber. To this you were driven. To find relief in such small things.

Exhausted, longing to sleep, Arud lay on the bed and could not close his eyes. He was thinking resentfully of the jealousy of others in the Mother Temple which had sent him on this mission. Ostensibly it was to show him off, and win him a promotion, maybe. But frankly such Watcher jaunts were the traditional way of being rid of an unpopular and ambitious brat. The five temples already visited, and this, were routine matters enough. But the expedition to come, up into the mountain valleys, to a town not even paying revenue more than once in ten years, would prove irksome and arduous. There had been rumors of curious goings-on there, trickling out with roving traders, bandits. Doubtless these tales were no more than nonsense, but the Watcher had been asked to investigate. They had dispatched him miles down to the coast firstly, to irritate him properly before the worst part of the journey should begin. It had already been half a month’s excursion. The uphill work would take longer.

With an oath, Arud turned on his stomach. (He was a comely young man, with an unshaven shock of springing hair.) Cah confound his envious detractors! And it was still Zastis—He quietened his fretfulness. There were girls here, big soft pillows of feminine compliance. He would be offered comforts. He could throw his weight about, for if he spoke poorly of them to the capital, Cah rescue them.

Forget the damnable journey and the bump of mud town on its mountain climb ahead.

He thought, as sleep began to come, of his father’s pride which had put the second eldest son into the temple. He thought of Cah, in whom he believed, but in an aloof, mathematical way. Arud was of a new persuasion. Not a heretic certainly, but a seeker after truth. Cah was an ultimate symbol, her rituals the correct reverence that an ultimate anything should command. Before the black stones of the Cah’s Arud bowed down, but he did not reckon Cah was especially in them. Cah was everywhere, and everything, the principle of life. ... As for mountain miracles—no. There were things explicable and there were lies. Arud slept. The bed became a woman.

After the evening meal, which was served early, the holy-girls trooped out of the yard and up an inner stair that led into the temple section of the precinct. Timing perfect, the brothel had been closed to ordinary patrons since the previous sunset. Each girl was cleansed and fresh, burnished and perfumed, with brass, copper and enamel glinting and clicking upon her.

Panduv, having no appropriate ornaments, and only the colorless gauze shift the mistress had awarded her, begged no bauble and made no show. Nevertheless, her fall of jetty hair had swiftly grown in confinement, and swung beneath her shoulders now. She had roped her waist with some twisted red cord found discarded by Selleb’s loom. Panduv was so unlike the other women, holding herself so straight, so black, so supple and so slender, she made a show regardless. Indeed, she moved one or two of the sisterhood to spite, to pinch her slim flesh and remark that she had better stand under a lamp, or she would never be seen at all.

They entered the corridor in which these whores stood or sat by day, to be chosen. Each girl took up a familiar position, leaning this way, or that, her hand on her swelling hip, or toying with her plaits and curls. Lamps of oil with two or three wicks shone with a dark fluttering glow.

Then footsteps approached, and great shadows rushed along the tunnel of women and lights, making all totter and fragment, as if shattered, falsely.

The mistress came first, slapping down her flat feet. She carried a rod of office tipped by a phallic copper bud. She looked expressionless on her holy-girls. Behind her walked the Watcher, the High Priest at his side, the Watcher inspecting the line of whores. They, since he was a man, lowered their eyes from his face. Panduv did not lower her eyes. The High Priest met the bold gaze with affront and some startlement, for he had not expected her inclusion in the line of choice—she had never been offered previously, being unacceptable. The Watcher, however, had hesitated.

Arud also was taken aback to find a black Zakorian before him, there among the soft pigeons, her eyes staring openly into his.

Panduv meanwhile had surprised herself. She had put herself into the line without the order of the mistress. Her plan was mostly formless and had nothing to do with sex. But it was still Zastis, and her preference being for men, Selleb had not sated her. This Watcher priest was young, and handsome, and though his body did not have the honed edge of Daigoth’s courts, he was only soft in the way her actor-lover had been, or the princes she had favored. She felt, in fact, a brilliance of desire. Holding his eyes, she partly veiled her own with the long black lashes, not subservience, the play of a fan, to let him see her awareness of him, as a man.

Next moment he was moving on along the line of cinnamon flesh. He continued to the corridor’s end, paused, and, in conversation now with the High Priest, went away. The mistress, informed of his selection, come back down the corridor, tapping the rod upon her hand.

She stopped before Panduv and said, coldly, “Go to the three-sided chamber. Serve Cah, and please him.”

And reaching past her, tapped the rod on the shoulder of Selleb.

A gentle scratching at the door in the hour before sunrise, did not rouse Panduv. She was already wide awake. The pettiness of her own anger at a backland priestling’s refusal had kept her primed all night.

Yet, as Selleb slipped into the room, Panduv made pretence of awakening. This, too, was petty.

“Well, did you please?” she said.

“Greatly.”

“Did he please you?”

“Ah,” said Selleb, “the touch of men means very little to me. Before Cah, I make believe.” She added, “He’s to be here another night.”

“Has he the sense to call you back, or will he want one of those lumps?”

“He was very taken with my skills. I told him who it was I learned them from.”

“What?” said Panduv.

“His appetite was still strong. The more I spoke of you, Panoov, and what you’d taught me, the stronger it became. He said you weren’t like a woman, and if it were left to him, you should be punished for looking at him the way you did.”

Panduv chuckled. Her tension left her. Another began.

“And he would like to see to it personally?” She stretched, and caught a handful of Selleb’s hair. “In Saardsinmey I wouldn’t have glanced twice at him. He would have had to woo me. He would have needed to be rich, clever, a wit, a poet. How low Zarduk casts the proud, into very pits.”

When Selleb was gone, the first milky hollowness had started in the sky. Don’t wait all day upon a call which may not come.

But there was nothing else to do with the Iscaian day but wait.

In any case, the call came at midafternoon.

The mistress waddled into the yard, and beckoned Panduv from the shade of her doorway.

“Wash and prepare yourself.”

The blood glittered in the black girl’s veins.

“Why?”

“You’re to go to the couch of the Watcher.”

“I?” said Panduv, “skinny and unlovely and Zakr that I am?”

“No insolence. I’ll have you beaten. It should have been done long ago. Make the most of Cah’s service. The High One means to sell you as a menial at the new moon.”

Panduv did not answer, but went to prepare herself for Cah’s service.

One of the little girls guided the Zakorian to that three-sided chamber where the guest was housed. The daylight, though mostly obscured in the furtive temple by ways, was broadening. It was the time sometimes called by poets in Alisaar, the Hour of Gold.

The little girl indicated the door, then ran away. Her mother, a whore, had told her the Zakorian was a demon—like all her race—and would, if the child were unwary, bite off her half-grown breasts.

Panduv rapped on a door panel.

“In.” The cry was peremptory, but mostly eager.

Panduv grimaced, composed herself, and opened the door. She stepped into golden space—a wealth of full light through a large latticed window. The patterns of the iron lattice fell upon everything, and now upon herself, and she was struck again by this image of broken lights—as in the lamplit corridor—half wondering what it might portend. Then she looked at Arud, lying on the couch. He wore a long loose shirt of linen, nothing more, but for a wristlet of silver, some prize of his that probably he never took off. Panduv, upon whom jewels and precious metal had showered, noted the vanity. But more than this, the flat belly and well-formed legs. It was a meaty body and would run to flesh, but had not yet done so. She felt again the hunger of desire, and gave him, across the gilded air, one intent gaze. Then, like a proper temple harlot, lowered her eyes. At the same moment she dropped from her shoulders Selleb’s borrowed mantle. Under it Panduv was naked, but for that emphasis of the red cord girdle, tied now upon ebony skin.

She heard him breathing. He was some while, eyeing her. Then he said, the slur of Iscah pronounced, “Come here.”

Panduv went to him, stepping meekly, not lifting her lids.

When she was close enough, he reached out both hands and took hold of her, pulled her down beside him.

“They’ve instructed you how to look at a man now, have they?”

He combed her hair with his fingers, his mouth on her breasts planting starving kisses, then one hand was under her buttocks and the other between her thighs. He rolled on top of her and entered her at once. He did not force, but neither did he attend. After a few thrusts he growled and collapsed on her, shuddering and done.

Panduv lay on her back. She waited. Presently he said to her, “I heard there were tricks you know. But you don’t know enough to give thanks to Cah.”

“You mean, to offer her my pleasure?”

He grunted.

“I had none,” said Panduv. “Or very little. Do you think it happens by magic? Is that the mystery?”

“You look too boldly and talk too much.”

“How can I teach you my tricks if I have to remain dumb?”

“You can show me. In a minute or so.”

“Then you must obey me.”

“Obey—” he raised his head, ridiculous and very handsome in astonishment.

“I must instruct you,” said Panduv. “You also cheat Cah of your pleasure. Do you think that thing you do, over in less than a minute, is worth anything to her?”

“Blasphemy now,” said the Watcher priest. But he observed her, and when she looked into his face, he grinned. “You’re so black I can hardly see any features. Only your eyes, and your lips, polished with gold.”

She drew his head down and kissed him, stroking his body now, taking time over it, so that he began to like the procedure. Even very ordinary love-modes of the ruby city would be new to him.

It was not a great while before he was aroused and wanted her again. But he was already more malleable, curious and lazy together. He let her he down on him, and when she took him in, steadying his tempo with her dancer’s pelvis, she worked for him, bringing him by stages to the pitch of uncontrollable excitement at which she lost him. On this occasion, he shouted aloud.

The light was reddening and Zastis no doubt on the rim of the east when they joined for the third time. He was much slower now. He lay back under her ministrations, gasping, and sometimes laughing in a way that pleased her: Beneath his hide he had some sense of the absurd. By now her own lust was at its wits’ ends. No sooner had they amalgamated than she found release. Remembering the dictates of Cah, she expressed herself in groans and sighs. Left to himself he followed her swiftly, and more noisily, and falling back, put an arm over her waist.

Later, food was brought to the door. Arud shared the supper with his bedmate, baked fish and cheese, figs and wine. She might have fought him for it otherwise, and perhaps he saw that, too, in her eyes.

When calm, his accent was nearly shot of the Iscaian blur. So there was no doubt when he told her she must stay with him for the night.

She had expected that. To make him want her for longer would be more chancy.

Even so, she had begun to have faith in him. She lavished on him a tenderness she had never felt for any man but sometimes pretended to out of affection. She played his body like an instrument—it was greedy but not insensitive. She offered him the bed-games of dancers and warriors and the slight but inventive perversions of the Saardsin court. He gulped all down. He was a pleasure-lover, and, too, teachable. He did not, of course, want to know anything about her.

At last he slept heavily. She lay beside him, pondering the temple, how it left him alone and shut in with a vicious Zakr “slave. But she was only a woman. She would not, for all her foul blood, be able to overcome the power of Cah, the omnipotence of men. Possibly, that would prove true.

When she was dozing, near morning, she feh him wake. He went to the vessel to urinate. Returned to the bed, she knew he lay a while in turn, looking at her. She could tell it was not only desire, now, but what else it was, she was unable to guess.

She acted an awakening. He put his hand on her, and caressed her lightly. And then he spoke the perfect words.

“Cah’s womb, but I’d like to take this with me.”

“Do it,” said Panduv. “They daren’t refuse you, here.” He was paying little attention. She continued carefully, “They said you have a long tour before you, through the mountains. The women there will be nothing. Thin as sticks—worse than I am. And not half so wise. No other holy-girl would have the stamina to make the journey with you. But I’m strong. My body is used to grueling exercise.” Then, Panduv made her voice velvet, she called him love-names, and kneeling, pressed herself to him, and murmured into his ear, “I love you. Cah’s stricken me. Let me be your property. Don’t leave me here to joy common louts. My flesh has known your flesh. After all, if you turn sick of me, if I offend you—you can sell me on the road.”

She could not see his face but she was able to picture it when suddenly he said, “You’re a liar, black girl, and a rotten one. Sell you on the road—if you don’t make off first. Do you know the reward given runaway slaves? For runaways from a temple? For those who annoy a priest of the goddess?”

Panduv drew back from him. She sat on her heels and gave him stare for stare.

“So you value yourself so slightly you reckon no woman could love you?”

“Women’s love—what’s that matter? Rubbish, nothing.”

Panduv said cunningly, “You offend Cah, to whom a mother is sacred. Didn’t even your mother love you?”

He opened his mouth—then laughed again. Lifting his hand he struck her glancingly across the cheek. Panduv leapt to the floor, her hand after the nacre sheath—her knife—which she had luckily removed before coming to him. Her eyes were for sure a leopard’s. She could kill him with her body alone. And then the temple guards would intercept her and do to her whatever they did do to slaves who annoyed the priests of Cah.

As for Watcher Arud, he was all agog. She should have been prone, entreating forgiveness. But this creature would not do that. She was a compendium—a swamp-cat, a devil, and a lean beautiful boy with breasts. His muscles still sang from what she had done to them. He already wanted her again.

“You lawless thing,” he said. “Cah didn’t create you. Were you even born?” He waved her to him. It was evident why.

Recovering herself, Panduv said, “I won’t he with you again, unless you promise me, in Cah’s name, to take me with you.”

“I can have you anyway.”

“Try,” she said. She thought, in that hot second, it might even be worth a death, to get her vengeance on him, for the temple and the temple food, for the Shansarian slaver and the wave that destroyed the city.

“Yes,” he said abruptly, lying back. “Get out then. Tell the mistress to send me in another girl.”

Panduv shrugged. She was no longer heated. She came to the couch and slid herself upon it. She lowered her head until the silk of her hair flowed over his belly and his thighs. It was the gambit of story and legend, but by Yasmat’s lilies, in such naive circumstances, a hope.

When he was writhing and arching beneath her, she pulled herself away from him.

“Promise me, and by Cah.”

“You—bitch—No.”

“You must finish yourself then.”

He lay helpless with fury, weak with interrupted lust, gathering himself.

“I’ll have them flay you.”

“You must still finish yourself.”

It was the absurdist in him that won her day for her. She saw the amusement struggling in his inflamed face. He gave-a roar and bawled at her: “You’ll come with me, to the mud-nest up the mountain. Miles without number—You’ll walk every step. You’ll have zeeba rations. If you become a burden I’ll sell you, or push you off a cliff. This I swear, by Cah. May she oversee my words. Now—”

She returned docilely, and gave him all he wanted. The rush of his orgasm, the sea wave . . . She had bought a potential liberation. With her body. The first time she had ever had so to use herself. In a night of bargains, she had become what she was meant to be, here, in Cah’s brothel.

12 False Magic

Zastis vanished on the first lap of the journey. Arud told her in the tent that night he would slough her at the next village prosperous enough to buy. “You’ll be able to escape from such a spot with ease.”

“Where should I go,” she said, “in this rocky dust-platter of a land?”

“Better now than later. The villages and the rocks are worse where I’m going.”

“Why not manumit me?” said Panduv, teasingly. “You paid the temple nothing for me.”

“No, you haven’t walked sufficient miles over the stones. I vowed it to Cah, to punish you. And you know if you run away from me, those outriders will soon get you back. They’d enjoy it. And then—”

“I adore you,” said Panduv. “I would never run away from you.”

Both of them laughed. It was a malign game, perilous—to Arud much more than to his slave. For there were chances now, to cut his throat in the darkness, to sprint away before the hue and cry was up. But, as she said, the land did not invite. Its tracks were channels of powder and its rivers thin runnels of spit. Ahead, the mountains were now in view, static brown upheavals going to distant mauve. She had exchanged one prison for another, but this at least was in the open air. Walking much of the day—despite his words, he afforded her now and then use of a zeeba, to the outriders’ disapproval—was exercise she valued. At their halts, too, she exercised and sometimes she danced for him, once even with a pair of lighted torches, though naked, for her clothing was a utility, not to be burnt. Arud marveled. He would not, being a son of Iscah, praise her, but he called on Cah over and over. Despite this, Panduv found herself rusty, her genius already withering. She had expected nothing else. Even so, it made her rage. It was a stormy session that night upon his blanket.

Before his servants, and in the villages, she adopted the decreed stance of the Iscaian female. She did not want to exacerbate him. Besides, coming to a mild fondness for him, she did not, either, wish to cause him embarrassment.

On her freedom, she had developed some awkwardness of thinking. She never had been free, she must acknowledge that. Perhaps slavery, although she had never formerly thought herself a slave, was now ingrained. If she ran from Arud, as she had said, to what should she run? It was more simple to remain with him. Too simple, maybe. But eventually life itself would show her the way. He would sell her, or dismiss her—at liberty. Or his enthrallment would go on, she would accompany him through the mountains and back down again, to the capital. And then, surely, something must occur, to wrench her loose, to employ her.

She would never move in the verity of the fire dance again.

She would never be “the Hanassian.”

Meticulous in diet and exercise, in the city she had had five or six or seven flawless years before her as a dancer, even more if her well-tuned body kept faith with her training. After that, obviously, decline would have come. She would then have been a valued instructress of the stadium, a courtesan if she chose, (as unlike a holy-girl as orchid to weed.) This existence might not have suited her either. She might have preferred suicide to ease and envy and regret, and not been the first. Yet that time was far off. Far, far and far.

But her body, agile, fluid and lovely, had already succumbed, betrayed her, in the foolish dance in the grove before lascivious Arud. He had thought her talent wonderful. She could have wept.

Late at night, Arud sleeping deep, when she might have got away, she had gone out among the trees and set up a small altar of stones, and burned some oil there. One of the outriders came to see what she was at, but finding her praying, left her alone.

She had given back her life’s reason to Zarduk, for to attempt any more the dance would be an insult to the god. She asked for some other thing to fill the gaping crevice in her spirit.

They climbed the paths into the mountains of Iscah. It was a thankless business. Up and down, down and up, the heights and the valleys, wading in the dust.

He took her less often now the Star was gone. But he liked the way she tended his hair, and massaged his body after the day’s fatigue. Hardly knowing he did so, he had begun to talk to her. In an unwary moment he remarked he was glad she was with him. She hid her eyes Iscaian fashion, covering her contempt. Probably that was the origin of the ritual. For if the women here showed what they thought of their men, doubtless the men would slaughter them at once.

There came a morning, when she was walking behind his zeeba, that he called to her.

“I suppose you believe in magic and miracles?” he said.

It was the first time he had asked her opinion.

She was not misled into thinking he wanted it.

“In what way do you mean?”

“This dung-heap I’m to go to, there’s been a rumor—Things that can’t happen do so, allegedly.”

Panduv was silent, attentive, respectful, striding by the zeeba. (Involved in an art form, she was no longer appalled at the act.)

Arud, who had never inquired even to that minute anything about her, taking it for granted presumably she came from Var-Zakoris, said, “This town, it’s not so far from the border. Have you heard anything of it? A weh called Ly Dis.”

Panduv felt a start of unnamable emotion. She went on striding, but her body seemed internally scalded.

“I’ve heard of Ly Dis. I knew a man born there, a village there.”

Abruptly, Arud was glaring down at her.

“Your lover?”

At last, a personal question. Panduv might have been tickled. He was put out at the idea of her having been selected by another man, in the days of her freedom.

“No. Not a lover.” She visualized Rehger Am Ly Dis. As bright as the sun, handsome as the Lydian. . . . She had not known him well, not as a man. He was one of the heroes, as she was. Her brother from the courts, child of her huge family.

“What’s the matter?” said Arud. “If he wasn’t a lover.”

But he did not wish to hear her history. And she did not wish to offer it. Rehger must have perished. With all the rest, he had been smashed and swept away. He, like herself, had died before his time.

They reached Ly Dis in a summer storm, dry, blustering with thunder, dust and wind. Bone-naked lightnings tore about the mountainheads above. They were so tall, those upper pinnacles, they had seemed, since appearing, to invite an aerial attack. Ly Dis town lay in a cradle of the lower crags, on whose levels the travelers had been for forty days of their monotonous ascending and descending. (The routes were easier and quicker from the capital—Arud had never ceased telling her.) The valley-cradle was .untidy, and the town, blathered by the storm, like a heap of stones.

Only a handful of beggars were on the dirt streets, huddled in what purported to be doorways. The temple, with the house of the local tyrant, abutted on a single paved square, with a well and a scaffold in close proximity.

The temple was a condensed replica of the fane at the port. The smell at Ly Dis, however, was larger. It stank, of blood, oil, incense, an overpowering odor that dashed at them with the wind.

Arud pulled a face. But he had also been telling Panduv for hundreds of miles that he expected the worst.

Word had been sent ahead long since, of the Watcher’s advent, but it might never have arrived. Certainly, no one came to welcome him. Arud sent one of the outriders into the temple to announce him, and sat his zeeba under the terrace, in the dust-storm, his panoply of baggage, attendants, and jet-black harlot about him, to get his dues.

The High Priest received Arud in a bare stone chamber. The old man—he seemed and moved as if he were ninety—wore his ceremonial regalia, a robe sewn with metal discs and black feathers, and a bird’s mask. Arud, who owed the Priest’s position unstinting reverence, bowed and genuflected, leering with scorn. The least acolyte in the capital, to Arud’s mind, was worth more.

No refreshments were offered, neither any ritual at the altar. They hugged Cah close up here, and their victuals tighter.

When the politenesses were done, it became apparent the High One was in some concern lest the visitor be after revenues. Arud must explain such accounts were nothing to do with him. He then coughed, and asked for water to moisten the dust from his throat. (And water was precisely what they brought him, murky at that.)

“It’s this other affair,” said Arud. The bird’s eyes goggled glassily. “Fabrications of wild magic. Healings. Conjurings.”

The High Priest did not move. The bird’s head did not. Outside the lightning cracked like a whip.

“It has come to the capital in the form of gossip and stories. Nevertheless, it was deemed serious, by the Highest One. I’m here to question you about it.”

Another silence.

“I would like,” said Arud, “to have a word from you, Father.”

The bird’s beak went down. It angled at the floor, and the gnarled old hands gripped the arms of the chair.

“We do not speak much of it.”

“Thinking it beneath your notice?”

“To make it so.”

The rejoinder brought Arud up short.

“That won’t do, High One. You must speak out now, to me. And I shall want to question any of those involved. And the woman.” He had kept himself till now from saying that: The woman. The admission that the tales centered on a female. There were sometimes witches, but they kept to the feminine side, practicing on or against their own sex. It was unlawful but not unholy. This woman, however, was reported to have power over the being of men. Arud credited none of it. He, too, would have preferred not to speak of it, to ignore it and let the falsehoods fade on their own. But the Mother Temple had sent him here to do the opposite. So he lectured the old High Priest for a while on the dreadfulness of not speaking and of striving to ignore, ending with: “And is it a fact? Not that she has any abilities, patently she could not. But that all this concerns a female?”

“So it seems.”

“Seems isn’t good enough. Father. No. You must send for this woman immediately. Have her brought. And perhaps, before I see her I might bathe and—”

“Not here,” said the High Priest, with a twinkle of malice. “I mean that the woman isn’t in this town. In these areas, there is often confusion, the names of places—it’s the village of Ly, that is where the woman is.”

Arud quivered with dire foreknowing. He choked on dust and muddy water, cleared his throat and snarled, “How far is it and where?”

The High Priest pointed upward.

“Five or six days up the mountain. You’ve come at a lucky time. In winter, or during the rains, it would take you much longer.”

The climb took seven days. The air was thinner. Shards and pebbles fell from the passes. The storm came and went. It needed only to rain to wash them away, back down to the heaped stones and the square. But there was no rain. The taller mountains screened the sky, like scored red-bronze in the sunsets.

At the night halts, Arud lay trembling with ire and slight fever, while Panduv bathed his forehead, massaged his feet. Her constitution was more robust than his, and she saw she had started to be indispensable.

The dwellings of Ly were in their cracked summer wholeness, the refuse mounds fermenting at. their doors. On high ground, Cah’s house, smaller even than the temple in the town but smelling as greatly, dominated the prospect.

Only the zeebas and Zakorian Panduv attracted attention on the streets. Filthy and unshaven, Arud, his clothing now totally defaced by the journey, escorted by outriders no better off—and also dwindled, two having gone missing at Ly Dis—might have been any itinerant nobody.

The temple servants who came out to accost Arud on the terrace top were inclined to dismiss his claims. He was driven to giving them secret signs of the religion.

When, finally, he had been taken away into the inner rooms, the outriders, grown desperate, gathered the animals and made for a crude drinking-shop they had seen. Panduv was left with the baggage on the terrace. Glancing up, she saw a square window, with two faceless creatures in it, peering at her: Holy-girls. Seeing her look at them in turn, they averted their eyes, and made superstitious signs. Zakr. Perhaps only to outrage and amaze them further, Panduv walked into the body of the reeking temple.

There were short thick pillars to sustain the roof; they loomed grotesquely, for it was very dark. At the port, she had never entered the temple hall, never observed any sacrament before the altar.

That was quickly come on, here. It was a butcher’s block, still steaming from a recent sacrifice, while blood had overflowed the drain below. Above all this, the statue, if it could even be enhanced with such a name.

Cah was black, as Panduv, but nearly shapeless. Bulges of breasts, and a bulge that was the face, for two amber eyes were set into it.

Something strange suggested itself to Panduv. What was it? These eyes—yellow eyes. Eyes for snakes, or Lowlanders.

A draft caught the meager lamps. The quarter light wavered, and the amber Lowlander eyes seemed to blink and steady upon Panduv.

Did the beautiless hump have some life? Was their goddess present in it—would she deign to be? The stone was very old.

Panduv made a gesture of politeness to a foreign deity.

The eyes went on, boring into her.

“What’s your riddle, lady?” murmured Panduv. “Do you want something?”

A man shouted harshly from the shadows.

“Back you! Zakr sow—stand off. You’ll defile the altar.”

“But I forgot,” said Panduv to the stone, “you hate your own sex, don’t you, lady.”

She bowed her head in suitable abnegation and stepped away among the columns.

The shouter did not pursue her. Very tired now, Panduv slipped down a pillar, to sit with her back against it, on the floor. She let her eyelids fall. She began to dream she was in Saardsinmey, inside the theater. The white Amanackire woman stood in front of her.

Panduv said, “You think you’ll need my tomb before I shall?”

“Oh, yes.”

She had unveiled. Her pallor was exquisite after all, her eyes like bright silver. She said, “And did I not say, Panduv, you would not need the tomb?”

“I’m dead. I’ll never dance again, with the fire.”

“Life is the Fire,” said the Amanackire. “We dance with it constantly, and burn off with it the draperies of blindness. It scorches us, till we learn, how to dance, the meaning of the dance.”

“He was your lover,” said Panduv, “Rehger. I’m at his birthplace. But he’s dead.”

“No,” said the girl. “He lives. I gave myself to death. He followed me in the death procession, up into your well-built, obdurate tomb. There he was, Panduv, when the wave broke Saardsinmey. The tomb withstood the water, as I knew it must. But what a terrible thing. I should have saved that city. I could rescue only the man I loved. A woman’s foible, Panduv.”

Panduv shook herself and opened her eyes wide.

Someone was standing over her. The shouting fellow again? No, it was a young woman, her own age, or a very little older.

Panduv was puzzled by an awareness of seeing someone that she recognized, had known at least by sight for many years. But she did not know this woman. She was an Iscaian, a wife who wore her hair in the ordained way, twelve plaits ending in copper rings. Her garment was darned and patched all over, her feet were bare and smeared with the dust.

But her beauty, that was another thing. Coming after the white girl’s glamour, so sharply recaptured in the dream, it needed to be of a fabulous sort. And so it was. The eyes that were the fulcrum of the beauty looked down on Panduv, as if questioning her state of heart or health.

“Don’t be afraid,” said Panduv. “I’m the body-slave of the Watcher priest. Quite tame.” And with a feral smile denied the sentence instantly.

But the Iscaian wife did not flinch, she only looked another second or so. Then she turned and walked to the bloody altar.

She stayed there some time, her back to the hall, her face turned up now to the shadow-face of the Cah.

Panduv watched intently. It seemed to her, from what she had heard and seen, even Iscaian women were not normally allowed so near the goddess. But no one shouted.

Presently the Iscaian left the altar. She crossed back over the temple hall, looking neither left nor right, and went out of the doorway.

Panduv came to her feet. For some reason she was going to follow the Iscaian. She did not know why.

As she emerged on the terrace, Panduv spotted her again immediately. The Iscaian was on the sun-baked mud of the street, walking slowly along, her hands loose at her sides. That in itself was unusual. Every other woman who went by, even to children of six years, ported something, baskets, jars, or bundles. As for the other persons on the street, they were aware of the girl. They did not stare at her, greet her, avoid or make way for her—but their actions became somehow self-conscious in her vicinity. They were like bad actors playing a scene in which one of their number goes among them supposedly invisible.

Then a man, a burly brute, stepped into the girl’s path. She halted, and all around the bustle of the street stilled. Now they could see her. Now they could stare. It was so quiet the chirrup of birds and insects might be heard, and the voice of the big man carried.-

“Cut my hand. Won’t close.”

And he thrust before the girl-wife a great wodge of paw and dirty bandage.

“Your leave to see, master?” said the girl. Her voice was soft. It was the Iscaian tone, pleading to be unvaluably of assistance.

Involuntarily, Panduv clenched her fists. Unclenched them. They all went on that way here, and she, too, when she was sensible.

The girl was unwrapping the bandage. Her movements were deft. She had been honored and must now take care to show herself worthy.

Panduv could not make out what she did, with the hand, the wound. It happened in a few seconds. The man gave a snort. Then he threw up his arm, over his head, flexing the hand. With the other he gave the girl-wife a light push. “Ah,” he said. “Cah be praised.” The raised-up hand had a blemish on the palm, a bluish ridge like a clean ten-day-old healing.

In the fever Arud had mentioned sorcery repeatedly. He had even once called the sorcerer she.

The girl was walking on, and the crowd pleated round her. Panduv after all stood rooted. Was this deceit? She herself had not been able to see the open cut. The man was merrily elbowing away to the tavern. Perhaps Arud’s outriders would hear his summary over their cups.

A knot of women meanwhile was just below the temple terrace, and they were muttering together, looking off now where the girl had gone.

Panduv ran lightly down to them. She touched one on the shoulder. The whole group cowered away from her, disliking, nearly showing their teeth.

“Who was that?” said Panduv, slurring her words forcibly, to offer them a nice homely sound.

“Who?” said one of the women.

The rest were speechless.

“The healer,” said Panduv.

The woman who had spoken shook her head. She, too, was a wife, all of them were, and the twelve rings on her hair clashed together.

“Yes. I saw her do it. If it wasn’t faked.”

The peripheral women were beginning to slink away. Two ran off suddenly. Panduv reached out and got hold of the one who had spoken. Panduv said, “My master is a Watcher of Cah. He’s in the temple now, with the High One. He wants to know the name of that woman. Dare deny him?”

A second woman spoke now.

“Her name is Thioo.”

“And she lives here, in your village?”

No answer, which meant she did not.

Precisely then Arud came out on the terrace, announcing himself by ranting: “Panv!” (Definitely agitated). “Here, you bitch!”

Which scattered the women like terrified beetles.

Panduv went back to him.

“He denies it all,” cried Arud in boiling passion, dignity superfluous. “The old imbecile in his stenchful bird-head. There is no witch. Nothing happens here.”

“Oh, master,” said Panduv, “I have just seen it happen.”

“What?” said Arud. His face collapsed.

“I was questioning those women, when you spoilt my luck by bawling and scaring them off. But I’ve seen her at her work, your sorcery-maker.” Arud was speechless. As an Iscaian woman with a man, he hung on her words. And, having divined its form, since one of the Iscaian acrobat-girls had had a lost sister of the same name, Panduv concluded, in the clear accents of Alisaar, “She’s called Tibo. She lives outside the village. But then again, if you go to the wine-shop, I can point out to you her victim, the man she cured.”

Arud exclaimed, then excused himself to the goddess.

Panduv was dismayed to find herself content at this miniscule victory, over a man.

No women were allowed in the wine-shop. Small boys did the serving. Panduv waited doglike at the door, under the shade of the tattered awning which comprised the roof.

There was no necessity for anyone to point out the cut-cured man, for he was noisy in his relief, and the two outriders had bought him a jug of drink.

Having been convinced Arud was a Watcher priest, the man divulged that the woman Thioo would already have gone home to her husband’s farm. She came in early to sell vegetables: She saw to the women. Panduv heard Arud say, “And to you.”

“I let her, yes. My woman’s useless, can get nothing right. I’ll smack her hard when I get home. I’ve got a good firm palm now to do it.” (Panduv gazed on the dust and wished the whole arm might drop off there.)

“Are you perhaps,” said Arud, “in league with the woman Thioo, to make a mockery of the temple?”

The man was shocked, infuriated, and frightened by this accusation. He was devout. He had made sacrifice to Cah only two days ago, which was why he was here. As for being in league with a woman—what man could be? He might as well plot with his cow. But Cah had given the sloven power that she might be of use to Ly. Cah cared for the men of Ly. They were lusty. She favored them.

“When did all this begin?” Arud interrupted eventually.

None of the men in the wine-shop was positive. Years gone. In the long snow. At the time of the disastrous harvests—hadn’t she stopped the fire, then? The woman had been thought an adulteress once, but that was previously. One of her men, her husband’s brother, had fallen off a pass in the rains. But Cah had proved the woman was dutiful. Maybe five years after that, at Big Thaw—Now certainly that was the month she saved a neighbor’s son, when the mother was killing him, trying to birth him out feet first.

Thioo’s own son had been sold, did you remember that? The slave-takers came. Ahsaarians. So poor, Orhn’s farm then, he had had to give his own boy. And Orhn was never much of a man, as a man should be. And the woman was barren again, after that.

(Panduv, at the door, had locked herself against the upright. Something was amiss in this tale—)

Arud said, “Well, then, let’s date this from when the slave-takers came.”

“Twenty summers, or more.” “More, more.”

“This woman isn’t young, then?”

No, they said. But nubile, still.

(In those mountain valleys a woman of thirty could look like a city woman of sixty. The woman Thioo—Tibo—had been near to Panduv’s age. She was young. Yet if she had borne the child the slavers took for Alisaar—Panduv realized, not the wonder of Tibo’s youth, but the aspect of the information from which she had been thoughtlessly advancing. She knew then why Tibo had seemed familiar. Tibo was the mother of Rehger.)

Arud was exasperated. His voice was full of high blood and Panduv could hear him banging on a table.

“You will all of you be questioned, at the temple, before the Cah.” A desperate silence fell. “Meanwhile I’ll want directions to the farm of this man Orhn, the woman’s husband.”

When he came out, Arud said to Panduv, “Another curse of a ride. But I’ll sleep before I do it. I vow that, Panduv. I’ll go tomorrow. She and her witchcraft can wait.”

Panduv walked the expected number of paces behind him to the temple.

She would have to walk behind the zeeba to the farm. Arud might not want her company. She must explain how useful she would be, to wash his feet and ease his back at the ride’s end. He might be forced to remain overnight at the farm. He must have a handmaiden, not trust to the domesticity of the witch.

Panduv had a violent need, a yearning, to see Tibo again. It was like love. How strange that now this unknown Iscaian woman should be the only link, the last representation, of Saardsinmey and the days of life.

13 The Witch

Up and down the tracks went, down and up. It had become the only mode of travel. The passes were tortuous and unsafe. The crags across the border stood northward like transparent paper. Beyond—Zakoris, and Panduv never gave it a thought.

The farm lodged in a valley, in a bowl of mountains, under a sky wheeling with three black eagles.

The poverty and ugliness of the place were almost dreamlike. Nevertheless, there were fowl in the yard, a cow or two on the pasture, and beyond these a rocky upcrop with a thick plantation of citrus trees already in young orange fruit. There seemed another low building in among them, something that shone pale through the rocks and trunks. Could anything to do with the farm have a sheen on it?

In the yard, a healthy-looking oldish man sat on a bench, with an elderly black dog at his feet. Both were asleep in the sun. As the travelers drew nearer, the dog heard them, lifted its head and began to bark. The man also woke up and made a flurry, waving his arms, and next running into the hovel.

“Cah bless us, a bloody ninny” said Arud. “The cup of plenty spills.”

He rode down into the yard, the one outrider (who had lost on the throw of the dice) behind him, and Panduv some three or four paces to the rear. The dog flattened itself growling, hackles high, to maintain the house door. But just then the girl came out.

“Hush, Blackness, hush. So,” she said. The dog hushed.

Arud had claimed from the temple a coarse-woven, poorly dyed, cack-handedly-stitched fresh robe. Seeing it was not only a man but a priest who had arrived, Tibo kneeled among the fowl, bowing her head.

Aarl’s night, thought Panduv. If she has any power. Why kneel?

Arud was dismounting.

“Get up,” he said to Tibo. “You are the woman Thioo?”

“Yes, priest-master.”

“That Thioo who claims to be a witch?”

Tibo waited, her eyes down on the pecking fowl.

“Answer,” said Arud. “Do you?”

“No, priest-master.”

“But you healed a man yesterday of a cut hand.” Another pause. “Do you deny it?”

Then Tibo raised her eyes, only to Arud’s sparkling-new-shaven chin, nevertheless, that high.

“It is the will of Cah.”

“You add to your crimes the crime of blasphemy.”

“If I blaspheme, may she blast me.”

They stood half a minute at attention, as if for a volley of lightning.

“I won’t say,” said Arud, “that you are a liar and a cheat. I’ll ask you only how you, a female, came by such gifts as they say you have, of healing and conjuration. Well? Do you dare tell me the goddess visited you?”

Arud had been questioning the villagers all morning, in the temple. He did not put them to any trial, but their terror was apparent, and they babbled. The witch could stop an outbreak of fire in the fields with a word. She could summon it, too, into a lamp or on a hearth. She had caused various animals to drop double sets of twins. Women in childbirth, or the sick, always wanted her. Barren women turned fertile at her handling. (Interesting, there, she could not see to herself.) She could send away storms and call the rain. She—

“I’ll say again, and you’ll answer me, woman: Did Cah visit you?”

“No, master. But once I was questioned before Cah. They let me lay my hand on her. I’ve guessed it started then.”

She believes that, Panduv, ferociously. She thinks that the stone passed magic into her, and that all is well in this land. She consents to kneel to the male priest, and to serve that witless one as if he were a king, since he must be her husband. She isn’t much like Rehger. The eyes. And then Panduv, thinking of Rehger, visualized the firm gentleness behind his fierce barbaric strength, the curious innocence she had once or twice noted in his beautiful face. Nothing foolish; more—profound. The eyes of a child several hundred years old, who has been able to unlearn the cleverness of his younger seniority. Tibo had a look of that.

“I’d take you to your temple to be questioned again,” said Arud, “but not yet. Cah, let me rest. Watch that dog and keep it off me. Give some water to the beasts.”

He went into the hovel with a proprietary but hopeless air, plainly pondering fleas and insalubrious meat and bitter beer.

The girl Tibo remained at the door until he and the outrider passed through. The zeebas had been tied to a post. Tibo drew water at the well, and took it to them in a bucket. She promised them fodder, Panduv heard her, talking in a secret friend’s voice at their ears.

Toward Panduv Tibo made no display of recognition.

Yet, she must truly have some sorcery. She knew, without knowing it or me, that I had some significance for her. I saw her son in his glory.

One large room, the hovel was divided from its main area at the back by two wooden walls. These created two sleeping cells, out of the larger of which into the smaller Tibo lugged a mattress. It was clean, fragrant even with herbs and the scent of soap. This bed was Tibo’s own it would seem. Her half-wit husband slumbered by her in the same room, but on another couch.

Tonight husband and wife, if needful, would share, in order the priest should have good rest.

Arud left his instructions. The outrider was to guard the entry to his sleeping-place for three hours, then wake him. The outrider sat by the entry, and, as promptly as Arud, fell asleep.

The husband had been reassured and gone out for a constitutional with the black dog. From the hovel yard they were visible in the valley, playing with a stick.

Tibo went on with her chores, now doubled by guests. She offered Panduv nothing, nor refused her anything. Panduv in turn drew water and drank two cups. Then she watched Tibo. In the end, Panduv spoke to Tibo.

“Are you afraid? I mean of this questioning at the temple. Arud is persistent.”

“I’m not afraid,” said Tibo.

She went into a hut and returned with fodder for the zeebas.

“Witches are stoned, aren’t they?” said Panduv.

“Yes.”

“But you’re not a witch.”

“I obey Cah.”

“Why,” said Panduv, “did you look so long at me in the temple?”

“Your black skin,” said the Iscaian.

Panduv checked. Perhaps it had been only that.

She followed Tibo back into the house and observed her making dough at the hearth. Panduv sat down opposite to her.

“I can’t help you with your wifely tasks. You see, I was never trained to them.”

Tibo made no comment. But suddenly she said, “Your master the priest has a fever. I grow an herb here that will cool it.”

“He’s not my master. He may try to think so. Nevertheless, little Iscaian wifeling, he’s useful to me. I’m not about to let you poison him.”

Tibo made no comment. And this time offered nothing else.

Tight-strung, Panduv said harshly, “They tell in Ly your son was sold to slavers some twenty years ago. I know the name of your son.” She hesitated, to equip herself with the essential, recognizable slur. “Raier.”

Tibo’s hands turned to stones in the midst of the dough. The hearth fire’s glow flickered against her face, its lovely youngness and veiled eyes.

“But he wasn’t yours. You’re no older than he would be.”

Tibo said, “Yes, but he was my son.”

The air tingled. This was like some duel, but not between enemies, not even sisters at practice.

“I have known him,” said Panduv. “He and I were starry lights of the arena at Saardsinmey, in Alisaar. His light was the greater. They called him Rehger the Lydian. He was a famous swordsman and charioteer, the best of them, gorgeous as a god—”

Tibo lifted her head. She looked at Panduv with great eyes full of ancient, worn and uncomplaining hurt, and sudden lashing anger. The power that came from her made Panduv start. In another moment, the Iscaian had controlled it, her emotion, the power. She soothed them down, like her dog at the door. Then she gazed far away, beyond Panduv, the hovel, the valley, and said, “Not now. Later. If you want, speak to me then. First I must answer to your master.”

Vastly disconcerted, Panduv could only rasp, “I told you, he isn’t my master.”

“What does it matter?” said the Iscaian, her eyes on other worlds. “Nothing matters. Here we are. Here, it’s the custom.”

“Your custom. That pie-brain up the valley—your lordly, masterful husband—does he give you Cah’s pleasure? I doubt if he fathered Rehger. What’s he worth?”

“While I’m married to Orhn, I needn’t take another man.”

“You could geld every man in the village with your magic. By the Fire, I felt it, just how, what you could do. You are a sorceress. Why be a slave?”

But Tibo was busy again with the hospitable dough.

It was quickly over, in the eventuality. Arud wakened near sunset, in a foul temper, berated the snoring outrider, said to Panduv, “My head aches—it’s the stink here—” which was wrong, for the hovel was kept fastidiously and did not stink—and called for beer and food.

Tibo served a savory stew, into which he would do no more than dip a chunk of bread. He was suspicious of venoms, or only of eating up some intrinsic element, and thus being warped to the witch’s charms. Panduv, having offered to act as his taster, did have a plate of the stew. It was delicious, and the hot cakes tasty. The fever was still on Arud, as Tibo had said. He drank cup after cup of “Orhn’s” beer, to quench the fever’s thirst.

The idiot husband ate farther along the board, sometimes feeding the black dog. She was a bitch, full of age, yet despite the gray on her muzzle, clear-eyed and alert. She had been ready to go for their throats at the door. Tibo’s youth, while it had not infused the dog, had still kept her in health. Panduv remembered how the idiot had played with the dog. He could not be blamed for anything. He looked at Tibo with un-Iscaian, unmanly love and admiration. She was now his mother.

Arud pushed away from the table, and called for more beer. He went over and sat in a wooden chair by the hearth, the fever making him want the warmth one minute, then draw off in a sweat.

Tibo filled his cup as he demanded. Suddenly he rose and caught her wrist.

The idiot whined, and the dog rumbled.

Tibo, not resisting, said back to them, “It’s well. Hush.”

“No,” said Arud, “it isn’t well. How will he manage after they stone you?”

It was then that Tibo lifted up her eyes to his. It was only for two or three seconds, enough, it seemed. In the beginning, Arud had sometimes struck Panduv, weightless puppy blows, and she had been able—after that first occasion—to contain herself. Later there was no aggression of this kind. Now his hand went whirling back, gathering up all the strength of his arm, to bring a blow on Tibo that could have broken her jaw. Panduv, who had been trained to know the measure of such things, sprang straight for him. She snatched his arm on its backswing, and hauled. The Watcher priest went toppling over, on his spine on the dirt floor. He took a pot with him, which smashed. He lay there in the debris, cursing and sprawling, his eyes madly upon Panduv, while the outrider, pulling a knife, made as if to come at her. Panduv flung up her hand, holding the outrider off with her dramatic gesture. To Arud she said, “Master, you mustnt strike her. Before Cah.

Arud gabbled, struggling to sit up. The outrider, in a dilemma (Panduv had cowed him), hurried to assist.

“Master,” wheedled Panduv, hating him, “I thought only to save you. If Cah truly is with her, you daren’t raise your hand against the goddess.”

“Cah—” Arud panted, his head swimming, blundering to his feet, “there’s no goddess—Cah is only life—”

“Close your ears,” Panduv said severely to the outrider, who was now blinking indeed, and making signs over himself. “You misunderstand his words.”

“Life—embodied in the symbol of Cah—” cried Arud, striving to teach them.

Panduv thrust him down into the wooden chair. She shut his mouth by putting her hand on it (scandalous). When she moved away, it was to balance on the soles of her feet, fighter’s stance, at the room’s center. She looked about. Everyone waited, even the idiot hiding behind a bench, and the rumbling dog.

“There’s only one means to see if this woman is a cheat,” said Panduv, “or sacred. You can do it here and now, lord Watcher. This man and I will witness. Tell her to demonstrate her abilities.” And turning, Panduv glared at Tibo. “Tell her to call fire.”

Arud was regaining some sense. Shivering, but coherent, he snapped at the outrider to refill his cup.

The dog had stopped growling. Everything was very still. The hearthwood crackled, the beer sounded as it ran into the cup, Tibo stood with her eyes lowered. She was waiting.

She would have done nothing—nothing—until the priest should require it of her.

Arud said, “All right. Let’s see you do that. Bring the fire, as they say you do.” And he drank noisily.

After which it was the quiet again, thick as syrup in the hovel room, the crackle of the hearth absorbed away into it. And then they heard Tibo breathing, audibly, deep, catching breaths—like a woman with her lover—

She will do this. It’s impossible and it will be done, Panduv thought. No trickery, a truth. The Fire of Zarduk.

Tibo extended her left arm. Her eyes were upturned, the whites visible. All at once the sound of her breathing stopped.

The Zakorian saw Tibo’s left breast gleaming like a lamp through the thin stuff of her garment. The light spread, into the shoulder, the upper arm. The forearm bloomed red as roses—it was the blood inside the skin—and the bones showed black. Then the left hand of Tibo became a torch, and from the four fingers and the thumb there pierced five spurts of living fire.

The outrider yelled. Arud had dropped the cup, for Panduv heard it rolling. The idiot and the dog, they only looked on, interested, accustomed, without a trace of fear. (The dog even wagged her tail.)

The flames, hitting the floor, leapt and twined. A fire dance. Then Tibo sighed. She began to breathe again, and her arm, shoulder and breast abruptly darkened like a dying coal.

Arud came plunging forward.

“It isn’t real. Illusion—ah!” He drew out singed fingers, beat at his smoking robe.

Tibo gazed down upon the fire.

“Hush,” she murmured. “So.”

And the fire went out.

Arud said, “It burned me.”

Between them, Panduv and the outrider caught him this time as he fell.

“He’s sleeping most serenely. What herb was that?” “It has an upland name. But I could show you.”

Panduv had administered the drink to Arud. For half an hour after swallowing it, he sweated profusely, and then sank back into a level slumber. The outrider stationed at the entry of the sleeping-place was by contrast wide awake, his teeth gritted and the knife lying across his knees.

Panduv and Tibo returned to the hearth. Orhn also slept on the bench, the dog dozing with her head in his lap.

“This life suits you then,” said Panduv presently.

“To what other life should I go?”

Panduv examined the words. They applied in due course to herself. She had already said them. Besides, she had tonight, even loathing his actions, defended Arud. She discovered in herself a tug toward him, a deep-seated moderating attachment. She had already tutored him in many ways. There was much that might be done—not to change him, but to allow him to be the man she had once or twice glimpsed under the flaccidity, the bludgeoning nonsense. This was rather dismal, that she had come to have such feelings for an Iscaian priest. But this was what fate had given her, and the gods. And Zarduk, whom she had worshiped in the tall temple at Saardsinmey, here he had let fall the bane-benison of his fire on an outlander who did not even honor him.

“However,” said Panduv, “we were going to talk of your son, Rehger. That was how the name was spoken, in Alisaar. Come now, your Orhn wasn’t his father.”

Tibo looked into the common flames of the hearth which she had summoned with flint and tinder.

“A man came here, once.”

“Your lover.”

“For a night. Cah sent him to me. I thought he’d leave me nothing. But I was childed by him.”

Panduv stayed silent, but Tibo said nothing else. So then Panduv recounted the youth and manhood of a Swordsman, of Rehger, in the courts of Daigoth. At first the story was objective. Then it became mixed with her own, the training which she had undergone—Next, the enormous sealed vista of that lost world opened before Panduv, and she flung it out before Tibo in turn, in the hearthlight, like a carpet of many colors. Woven there, the trials and failures, the excellences and the rewards. Woven there the city, its squares and avenues, the adulation of the crowds, and the ringing of the sea. The markers of the festivals, she related, the seasons of its calendar. The night of the Fire Ride, and how Rehger had won it. She conjured Rehger, as if she, too, were a witch, there into the hovel, and caused him to stand before his mother, in beauty and pride. Panduv herself hung the last garland on his golden brow: She made him from the night, as he had partly been, the cipher for Saardsinmey.

And after that, when the hearthlight guttered—she had talked for more than an hour—it came time to tell of the end of the city and of Rehger’s death. And only then, Panduv recalled the dream she had been having, in the Cah temple of Ly. The Amanackire girl who said to her: “Your well-built, obdurate tomb. There he was—when the wave broke.” And the Zakorian, explaining the destruction she had never seen, of her city which was not hers, to a woman who surely could not, being ignorant for all her sorcery, comprehend half of that which Panduv specified—Panduv found herself saying, “But someone assured me, Tibo, that your son survived the cataclysm. It may not be a fact. You’re a witch, perhaps you can divine. If he’s alive.”

But Tibo was looking away and away into and beyond the ashes on the hearth. In the new silence, Panduv felt her own exhaustion. She was wrung out. She had made confession and she was purged, she was empty. She could have wept at last, but she scorned tears, the Zakorian. Fire not water.

When Tibo rose, Panduv looked up at her in a vague surprise.

“Consent to come with me. There’s something I’ll show you,” said Tibo.

Not a whisper about her son, not a glimmer of that hurt and cruel fury that had been in her face before. Nothing. Had she even heard, this Iscaian drab, even noticed the jewelry carpet of a city laid before her?

Panduv got to her feet.

“What is it?”

“Outside, a little way.”

Panduv’s instinct verged on distrust, but she said, “If you like.”

They stole out of the house, and by the door Tibo took a lantern, and with the flint she lighted it. Panduv said scathingly, “The god will be glad you don’t waste his fire.” But Tibo, of course, did not reply.

They walked through the summer night, across the pasture where the cows lay like boulders under a slender tree. A stone wall had mostly come down, and over it they went into the citrus trees and the standing rocks.

The beacon of the lantern disorganized rather than assisted vision. When it smote on the dome, this seemed an error of the eyes. Then the light steadied. It hardened into being.

“What is that?” Panduv recollected now having sighted the shining top of this object as Arud approached the farm.

Tibo said quietly, “It was always there, underneath. But the trees grew bigger, the roots pushed off the soil. Last summer, the earth shook and lifted it up.” At her words, Panduv envisaged the pale smooth thing, rising like a fish, through the tide of the earth-tremor. It did not seem to be all above ground even now, but wedged into a socket of stone. The form of it was nonetheless like the shape of the fish of her imagery. The material of which it was made appeared metallic, but there was not a scratch or pock upon it. No mark at all.

“When you go near enough,” said Tibo, “an opening comes.”

They went forward, very slowly, the lantern engorging everything before them, putting out the rest of the valley.

And, as predicted, a door-opening evolved in the side of the fish-shape mound. Such mechanisms were not unknown. The modern temples of the snake goddess, Panduv had heard, were frequently so equipped. Yet the manner in which the door made itself bewildered her, happening not with an upward, downward or sideways motion, but in a kind of swirling. . . .

Within the door, was only darkness.

“Have you gone inside, Tibo?”

“Never.”

“Afraid to.”

“Yes. Here always, I never like to be here.”

“You’re a sensitive. It must be a bad place, then.”

Panduv took the lantern from her, and, going closer to the opening, let the light press on the darkness.

It was an oval chamber without corners, and again she thought of the white races, tales of the round halls in their ruined city in the southern Plains. Instantly the lantern found a confirmation. There on a featureless wall, what she took for a carving. A coiled, unmistakable snake, white on white.

The Zakorian moved back, so the darkness possessed the hole again.

“It’s a temple. The Plains People had them everywhere, scattered, even in the land of Dorthar. This must be old as the mountains.”

She felt that she was shaking. It was not fear. There was a current of energy in the vicinity of the snake temple, a supernatural force to be avoided, as Tibo said she inclined to. Panduv backed farther and the electric awareness was less. She said, “Why bring me here?”

Tibo said, “Cah is here.”

The Zakorian swore. “No. Cah is a goddess for the Vis. Yours. Mine, maybe. That thing, there, that’s the yellowhairs’ magic. Their goddess, the Lady of Snakes, Anack.”

Tibo said, “Cah forgave my sins. Each month, her hand was on me. When this thing came out of the earth, it was full of Cah. I’m afraid here. Fear doesn’t matter. This place is why I heal and how I bring the fire. I’ve told no one else. It’s Cah’s place.”

“It’s theirs,” said Panduv. She was angry. Stupidly she thought of athletic contests between the dancers of the city and blonde girls of Sh’alis. Inappropriate, yet total—the racial unmeeting, the fight, the war going on in small ways or large. Would Sh’alis not have sung over the battering of Free Alisaar by a white, screaming wave?

Panduv shut her eyes and saw a star dashing, flaming, from the sky. It crashed against the bosom of the earth, seared and split the land, driving a channel, burying itself deep. As the patchy clouds and cinders settled, the star lay smoldering in its ditch, in a valley between mountains.

“There,” said Tibo, as she put her hand on Panduv’s shoulder. “You saw the star? I’ve seen it, too. Cah’s sky-chariot falling. It remembers.”

“Lowland magic, the power of flight,” muttered Panduv. Tibo had taken her hand, and was leading her away from the shining domed mound, temple, fallen star, time-fish, between the citrus trees, into the commonplace pasture where the cows still lay peaceably chewing.

Panduv’s limbs were water. She sat herself on the rough grass before she should stagger, “I don’t like that, it isn’t for me,” she said. She shivered. “But for certain, it had some meaning.”

Tibo loitered patiently until the Zakorian got up again. They returned into the hovel. They did not speak to each other any more.

Lying by Arud on Tibo’s mattress, Panduv dreamed of Saardsinmey after the wave.

She saw initially from high up, as if she flew winged above the wreck. Far below, the landscape was a desert, with jagged monoliths and fanged ravines of masonry. She would not have known it for a city, except she had come there in the dream armed with its former name.

Circling, as once the hunting hawks had done, she descended through the bruised air.

She was impartial, the winged Panduv, in the dream. It did not tear her heart or consciousness, how it was, the sights of it.

On the roof of the Zarduk temple, whose entrails had been wrenched out, a ship rested. She flew by the ship, circling the pillars, and away. Above, there lay the stadium, which, with almost everything, had been obliterated. There was only an abysm—the arena, piled by tumbled things.

North and west, a metropolis of ruins, clung with seaweed, with bits of shells on their stairs and roofs and floors, and dotted with all the feasible remnants of a human society suddenly vanquished.

A wind was blowing. It was clearing off the blots and stains of the atmosphere, and Panduv was blown to earth by it, and alighted, still high over the city, where she might have expected to, on the Street of Tombs.

Everything was mud. The marble seemed mostly to have been turned to mud. And here, too, as she had dimly noted in the shattered ruins beneath, tiny groups of men and women were picking about, like beggars in a gutter after a coin.

Panduv, invisible, poised among the mud hills, and looked at them with mild pity, but no sense of kinship. They were distant in all ways. There, where a white stone had protruded from the clotted slime, someone was grubbing, trying to pull out a corpse by its legs. But there another only sat, and did nothing.

The soul of Panduv—so she supposed it was—began to drift again. It came along a rise, to the sarcophagi of kings and queens, the entertainers. On the incline above rose the black beehive of her own tomb, washed up amid the aloes.

The door stood open on its runner. She recalled . . . Rehger, maybe others, had found shelter there. One of these persons, seemingly left behind, now stepped from the doorway, white out of black.

Panduv was not alone in seeing the phenomenon. Two women a short way down the slope had stopped in their grim pottering. They appeared terrified, as if by an apparition, not realizing that this was only some survivor of the wave like themselves.

The figure was not intrinsically alarming. It was that of a girl, wearing a white dress, her head also veiled by white. She did not stay to gaze about her, but went on, up the incline, away from the black tomb. On the crest of the slope, however, she did hesitate, and next looked back, as if she had become aware of another watcher—Panduv.

The white of her clothing blended subtly with that of her skin and hair. The survivor out of the tomb was the Amanackire.

In the dream Panduv experienced no shred of wrongness. On the eve of nemesis, avoiding the gossip of the theater, she had never heard of the Lowlander’s poisoning, while her actor-lover had been too busy with other commerce to tempt her ears with it. Panduv had not known of the murder, the burial, until that other dream in Ly’s temple. I gave myself to death—The former dreaming, recaptured in this, conveyed only utter correctness.

The Amanackire had died, and by her death, ensured that Rehger might find shelter from destruction. Some days had passed, and Rehger, too, was gone. And rising up in the shadow, healed and whole, the white girl moved out into the world.

Now, drawing her veil over her face, she walked on across the rim of the hill and disappeared from view.

Winged, incorporeal, still Panduv did not follow her.

Instead she woke with a dreadful violence, jammed back into her body, not knowing where she was or what had happened to her. And in the intuitive battle to reclaim her memory and herself, for her heart to beat and her lungs to breathe, this dream, like the other, came undone and flowed away, down again into the sea-depths within her, out of sight and out of mind.

“What am I to tell them, that they could accept, at the Mother Temple?”

Arud voiced his distress twelve days later, when they had got beyond the crow’s nest of Ly Dis, among the enduring sameness of the mountains.

Now he is actually asking me.

“There is a course.”

“Yes? Well? Well?”

“Inform them the rumors were grossly overblown. She’s a healer who sees to women’s complaints. She has the antique art of making fire with two pieces of wood. She does nothing, meanwhile, without invoking Cah, and her temple finds her virtuous. Besides, she’s married, and her husband wouldn’t permit her to do anything unlawful.”

“Falsehoods, woman. I’m to condemn myself before the goddess by lying?”

“Cah is only an idea ... the embodiment and symbol of life.” (The two outriders were some way behind them, out of earshot. The other absconding pair had vanished even from the town.)

Arud did not chide Panduv. Conceivably he recalled how she had defended his feverish avowals to the world at large. How she had mentioned, too, the outrider’s extreme unreliable drunkenness on the night in question. Should it ever be of use.

At last Arud said, humble before the infinite, “There are some who think in that way. Not gods, but their essence. In the capital, provided a man’s discreet . . . Even the Highest One—Cah is All. Everything. The fount of existence. Not simply a stone with breasts.”

“The Lowlanders, I hear, speak that way about snaky Anack.”

Arud frowned. “Cah is the one true goddess.”

“Then credit that the little Iscaian wife acts only in her name. Tibo’s a devout believer. Let her alone. What does your temple care? And you. You only want to be home.”

“Yes,” he said. He heaved a sigh. “I’ve a house, on a hill. Breeze-fanned in summer. Flowering vines. A fish pond. Blue walls. You’ll like my house.”

So I am to be in his house.

She thought of his love-making of recent nights, changed and passionate, and very deft. The dance of fire was over. She had become after all an instructress and courtesan.

Besides, she had not been able to safeguard herself. Or perhaps she should not have asked her own gods to fill the void in her days. Jokingly, Yasmat had intervened.

“Arud,” she said, for he was learning, too, that in private he would be addressed by his name.

“What is it now?”

“I’m carrying your son.”

He seemed to consider this. Some minutes passed.

“Well, how do you know it’ll be a boy?”

“I know.”

That would have been her role in Zakoris, in the sea village. To take men in, to thrust men forth. But she was fit and vital. A pregnancy would not quell her. It would be a child of late spring or early summer.

Yes, she was strong. The strength of any partner would be superfluous to her. Her lovers, whatever their reverence for a dancer’s genius, or their titles or intellectual knowledge of songs or stars, they had, none of them, been her spirit’s match.

And a warrior needed wars. Iscah would be one long campaign. She laughed aloud, and Arud said, “You’re glad then, you Zakr girl, to be filled with my son?”

“Only delighted to delight you, master.”

“You’ll be mistress of my house. Have no worries on that front.”

One must not employ irony. Be generous and lesson in generosity. At least, keep quiet.

He glanced down and saw her, striding by him, straight and royal, black as night, her long hair like a banner—having no past, for he had given her reality. He stopped his zeeba. He took her up before him. It was not Iscaian, and the outriders stared.