The Birthgrave (26 page)

I cast out the grains and stood over them for a long time, as if I saw something, then turned again and said: “There is an animal walking on six legs, but the head is severed, and I cannot find it in the pattern. Before the animal is a pit, into which it will fall, because it has no head to guide it.” They murmured, and I spread out my hands and cried: “It is the wagon people. Six parts without a leader.”

They broke into shouts and yells then of alarm and surprise, calling out the names of their own particular merchant lord.

I held up my hand for silence, and when I had it, I said, “We must choose one leader for us all. It must be done. This is Sibbos' warning. Let us pray to him to direct us.”

Then I began the prayer which I had used to him before, in the mornings and evenings.

“Great god, guide us through the dark places, and let no harm come to us. Protect us from danger and distress. Let us judge well in what we do. Give us our bread and our drink, our quiet and our rest. And when we call upon you, do not turn aside from us.”

It was a simple thing, but their minds were open and naive. The phrase, “give us our bread,” so innocently placed in the prayer, unconsciously recalled Geret, the wheat merchant. When it was finished, I looked at them and asked: “Who will you elect for your leader?”

I had told Geret that when I said this, some of his men and women must shout his name. This they did, and, all at once, the whole crowd had caught up the cry. They swirled around and made for his wagon, and soon Geret came out in apparent amazement, and reluctantly agreed to become their master.

As for Oroll and the others, they grumbled a little, but agreed at last that the leadership was nothing in point of fact, and might be useful as a spur and comfort. As I had guessed, Oroll was too indecisive, and the others followed him and accepted the situation.

Things were easy after that. Geret was their lord, but I ruled Geret. For once I felt the strength of command, and freedom, and a sense of identity. I had pored long hours over the old yellow maps of the land we were going to, beyond the Ring and the Water. And now, when I dreamed, I sensed ahead of me the green cool beckoning of the Jade. Incredibly, it seemed, I had guided myself, without knowing, toward my goal. Not once had I deviated, only slowed myself in my time with the village, with Darak, and now with the wagons. Never had the awareness of an imminent fulfillment been so intense. I would wake, burning with joy, trembling and alight with expectation. Soon, soon.

* * *

On the second day from Geret's election, we came to a high place, a treacherous climb among the white-crusted rocks, to a black round hole: the Tunnel through the Ring.

1

I
T WAS A
black journey, and lasted ten days.

The Tunnel was perhaps some twenty-five feet wide and about twenty feet high, though in places it varied, the walls and ceiling drawing out or in. At all times there was space enough to get through, and at intervals we found wide cave-rooms where we could halt and make a camp. The worst of it was the dripping damp, the hollow soundlessness which would pick up a thought and seem to speak it at you, and the darkness that fluttered at the torches like gigantic bats. And there was, too, the nameless fear.

Many of the children fell sick in the Tunnel, but the fear was always the cause of it. The adults, too, became prey to sudden aches and faintings—which they put down to bad air creeping through from other parts of the mountains. Fear was a natural thing; I had expected it—the unconscious terror of the miles of mountain rock balanced over our heads, the primeval terror of dark underground, common to all creatures who are mortal and bury their dead in the earth. Yet this fear was more than these things. I knew, long before I found the key to it. The ghost of the Lost was very strong in this place.

I began to dream of them again, yet the dreams did not appall me as they had. My edge was blunted. I had glimpses of the building of this place—the human overseers, turned against their own people through fear of the Higher Race. I saw the sweating gangs heaving at stone, their flesh dead-white as the flesh of slugs from years underground. The whips flicked and cracked. Men fell dead. When
they
came, they were beautiful in the horror and degradation. They had had greater plans for this tunnel than there had been time to achieve—pillars, carving, frescoes. It should not have been a mere worm's hole through rock, this passage, but yet another of their unsurpassable works of art built by the toil and misery of underlings. Later, I found the scratch marks on the wall—faded, unreadable to any except eyes as accurate as mine. These were not in the Old Tongue, but an ancient form of the language I had heard in the village, the hills, Ankurum, and among the wagons. And they were all curses— curses against the Great Ones—the curses of men.

Once, at one of the five camps we made, I found a back cave, very wet, hung with stalactites like stiff curtain fringes of glass. There was a black pool, and, at the bottom, bones gleamed dully. Just at the lip of the pool, this one had chipped in the ancient slang of humanity:

Sickness, the serpent, is coming to bite you,

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

Rest uneasy, you stinking carrion, on your gold beds.

Near the end of the Tunnel, the passage was less finished, and more treacherous. There were narrow bridges over black nothingness, where the wagons were partly unloaded to lighten them, and men and horses walked singly. And there were places where the roof dropped low enough to scrape the canvas wagon tops. But soon the air picked up the curious sweetness of above-earth air, and sharp fresh breezes blew down into our faces.

The tenth day we broke free of the tunnel-womb, and came out onto the rocky plateau that stretches for miles above the great expanse of river they call the Water.

It was late afternoon, the time when spirits usually begin to flag, but they rose high today when we reached freedom. Children and dogs ran round and round in frenzied games; there was a great sighing and relaxing, and looking up at the sky.

It seemed a curious thing, for we had found the Tunnel in the snow drifts, but now, on much lower ground, there was only the bare rock. Behind, the mountains towered, white to their middles, but here, a little warmer and beneath the snow line, we had only the fierce wild winds of the south to trouble us. They were dry and harsh, like the land they came from. We could catch a glimpse of it, that land, faintly, through a haze of distance—a dim smoky outline of flatnesses, all one desert emptiness it seemed from the plateau. Yet there must be life, or why had we come?

The river was another matter. It was many, many miles across, almost like a small tideless sea, a brilliant blue that would have nothing to do with the dull sky. There was apparently some deposit in the clay at the bottom that turned it this color, yet it seemed shocking in its intensity—a wide aquamarine ribbon, running from west to east as far as the eye could see, and onward almost to the horizon—a painted slash across the featureless gray-brown landscape.

Three or four streams forked down from the rocks, turning into falls to jump the gaps—these glass-clear and quite safe to drink from, as the river was not. A mile or so from the plateau a camp was made for the night at one of the many glittering pools these streams formed on their glittering progress to the Water.

Like dogs with the scent of the quarry in their nostrils, they were up early, and away again at dawn, winding down the track to the river. We got to it by midday, and uneasy silence fell on the wagon people.

There was the barren shore, where nothing seemed to grow except little clumps of a black sticky grass. Rocks, skinned and bruised by the rasping winds, stood up like thin deformed giant women in the attitudes of their bitterness and insanity. The air, sucking through holes in these rocks, made noises like girls crying or animals shrieking in pain. Before us, the blue beautiful poison of the Water, now the only thing we could see ahead of us to the horizon. It seemed a lost land, no place for us to be waiting in, for this is what we had to do. Today, or tomorrow, the boats would come from that seemingly empty other side, and take us and our wares across. Geret had said there were settlements and steadings on the other bank, and, farther south, the first of the great cities. But he was vague. None of them seemed to have accumulated much information about this place, as if it had hypnotized them, or drugged them, or as if they simply did not want to recall.

The wait went on, and a camp was made. The fires crackled redly in the gathering dusk, and it was very quiet—no bird song or animal cry, only the frightful noises in the rocks, the slight sluggish movement of the river.

I lay in the wagon, unsleeping. The cat crouched in a corner, wide awake, muscles tensed, her coat slightly bristled. I smoothed her and kissed her cat eyes shut and she slept, but twitched in her sleep uneasily, reminding me of Darak. Later Geret came, rather drunk, swinging in with little ceremony.

“Pardon me, Uasti,” he said, brash with the beer, “but it's an ill place here. Most of us seek company for the nights by the water.”

“So, Geret. Go and seek company.”

He sat down and offered me the leather beer-skin.

“No? Now, Uasti, we should be friends, you and I. I helped you with the women when they wanted to kill you, and you helped me later to get what I wanted. I do very well now—better food, and a proper council where I have the say of things. There was a little girl I fancied, you know—her brothers were funny about it, but they're friendly enough now, and so's she.”

“Then why not go to her tonight, Geret?”

“Tiresome,” he said, “always the same one. A man likes variety.” He slipped one hot hand onto my shoulder. “Come, healer, you're young and smooth under that robe—I know, I've seen you. And not a virgin, either, I remember. Oh, I was rough before, but I'll behave myself now.”

“I do not want you,” I said. “If I had wanted you, I would have made you welcome long ago.”

He gave a little grunt of disbelief, and began to explore my body with his sweating hands. I thrust him off, and, surprised at my strength, he was still a moment.

“Have you forgotten so soon, Geret,” I whispered to him, looking in his eyes, “what I can do to you?”

He shrank back at once, groping for the leather bottle.

“Go,” I said. “There are plenty to help you. Out there.”

He lumbered from the wagon, and I saw him swaying through the dark, cursing.

I, too, left the wagon then, for it seemed full of the smell of him and the beer. The night was cold, yet oddly close. The wind gushed and quieted alternately.

I had begun to feel at last the rope that tied me to the wagons, and I yearned to go free. I wanted my aloneness, it was a longing in me.

I walked along the pebbled shore, and left the camp behind. Below, the water lay like ink, and I could smell its sweet and deadly smell. I recalled my race who had walked upon water, and wondered if I could cross, as they had crossed, to the far side which seemed, particularly now in the dark, to call me.

A cold white light struck suddenly over me, making me start and look back. The white moon had crested the mountains behind me. Its markings were oddly accentuated by the dusty air so that it resembled a bleached skull. The light lay in a sheet of silver glass across the water, and all at once it seemed a path, a safe way for me to cross by. My hands clenched, my body tensed with expectancy and the sense of Power. I stretched out one foot to begin my journey—

A shrill cry behind me, then other voices. I made out the call.

“Uasti! Healer! Healer!”

I turned, angry, sparks of fury burning under my skin, making every hair on me stand on end like the hair of the cat. A man came running along the bank, and I did not even walk toward him. As soon as he was near enough, he began to shout the story—his child, a baby of two or three years, had crawled away from its mother and drunk the blue water. The man tugged at my hand, and I knew I could save his child if only I hurried back with him, and I could not seem to do it.

“I am with the god here,” I said to him, “and you have interrupted us.”

He stammered, nonplussed and at a loss, and suddenly the glass light on the water seemed to crack, and I knew what he was asking, and turned and ran with him.

The child was screaming and kicking, the mother in a frenzy of terror. I turned her out, and made the child vomit copiously with one of Uasti's medicines, then poured cup after cup of clean water down its throat, together with various herbs and powders. Pain had made it obedient, but once it was relieved it became fractious and sleepy. I thought I had saved its life, so soothed it and let it sleep. I was very weary by then, and went away to sleep myself. In the hour before dawn the man came and woke me—the child's body had turned blue. I went with him but I could not even wake it, and soon it died.

“The poison of the river was too strong,” I said to them.

The man nodded dully, but the woman said, “No. You weren't quick enough. He said you wouldn't come with him at first, when he ran to you.”

“Hush,” the man said, “it was only a moment, and she”—he dropped his voice—“was with the god!”

“What do I care for the god,” the woman suddenly screamed, catching up her dead child. “What god is he that takes away my son and leaves me nothing!”

I should have felt pity, but I felt only contempt. I knew had it been a girl she would have mourned less, and it angered me. I turned from them without a word and went away.

I lay down to sleep again, stiffly, not caring what story the woman would spread about me, only wanting to be free of them all, and across the blue water.

2

There was a high wind at daybreak, full of dust. The girl came as usual, bringing food. I fed the cat, the flaps of the wagon down against the grit-laden day.

Perhaps an hour later I heard the single shout, followed by others, and the noise of feet on the pebble-beach; they had sighted the boats from across the Water. I picked up the bundle I had made of my stuff, and called the cat to follow me. She jumped down and stalked after me to the brink.

The wind had a color now—grayish yellow like the land. The dust whirled and flared around me, making it difficult to see very much, but I was glad of the shireen for it protected me completely. The others had wound cloths about their mouths, and pulled the hoods low over their eyes. I could just make out the faint, far-off shapes on the dust-smudged blueness, and wondered how the men had seen anything. Then I heard the low-pitched, nasal moaning of a horn. This had been their warning, though I had not heard it in the wagon.

It was almost an hour's watch, there on the shore, while they struggled toward us over the grit-pocked river. At last they beached on the rotten soil a little way down from us, five long unpainted vessels, certainly more than the “boats” Geret's people had called them. They were low, but raised at bow and stern into a curving swoop, roughly carved like the tail of a big fish. Each possessed a solitary sail, but these were stripped from the masts, and the single banks of oars had been in action. Now the oars lifted, were heaved upright, and men came jumping among the pebbles. They were very dark—darker than any people I had been among so far, for though there had seemed a predominance of black hair in each place I had gone through, there had been fair skins and light eyes, and, among the tribes, brown and blond hair too. The newcomers had an olive tan—almost a gray tan, as though like the wind they had picked up the color of the land. Their eyes were black—the true black, where it is impossible to tell iris from pupil. And their hair, lopped very short, often shaved totally to leave a shadowy stubble on their heads, had a bluish sheen to it I had never seen before. The other thing about them, perhaps the strangest, was the black, coarse clothing they wore, unrelieved by any ornament. Even among the tribes there had been a glint of color or metal here and there, and apparel had shown the individuality of its wearer. These men carried nothing, apart from short knives in their belts, and what they wore had a distinct sameness—almost like a uniform, though it was not. They did not even carry protection against the dust.

A tall shaved-head came and spoke to Geret, Oroll, and the rest waiting behind. The grim face gave nothing away. Already the rowers and the wagonmen were unloading and stacking stuff into the ships.

Finally Geret turned around and came along the beach, looking fairly satisfied. As he got near me, he glanced up, and his face turned sour.