The Birthgrave (29 page)

“So this is the goddess, is it? This scarecrow from some steader's field? Have you lost your wits, Sronn?”

I began to see a little, and my eyes focused unwillingly on the man who had spoken to them. Electric fear sprang from my skull into my spine. It seemed I knew him, knew him very well.

“Vazkor, High Commander, the True Word spoke of the coming of the goddess,” the captain said, his head bowed before the man who was his lord, second only to the Lord of Ezlann.

“I know it. Uastis. Does this
woman
—I call her a woman for want of a description vile enough to suit her looks—seem to you the reincarnated spirit of the Ancient Ones?”

“She killed, Vazkor, High Commander. I have told you.”

“Yes. You have indeed told me.”

Cruelly, my eyes were clear now, I saw him well. A tall, large-boned, elegant frame on which his dark masculinity hung vital and animal and sure. He, too, was masked, a golden mask shaped like the head of a wolf, red glass in the narrow eye-pieces. The silver hair of the wolf mane lay sparsely over his own, which reached almost to his waist, and was the intense blue-black of the Dark People. The skin of his hands seemed the gray-olive tan of theirs, yet their shape was very different. Three black rings glowed on the thin, iron-strong fingers. He wore a long black velvet tunic that reached to mid-calf, but was slit open at the hip on each side, reminding me of the leather bandit flaps. Black trousers of fine shimmering cloth, and boots of purple leather with countless winking buckles of gold. Around his neck hung the chain—eleven smooth rings of hollowed green jade, with golden links.

He had stood quite still since coming into the room. Now he put one hand on his captain's shoulder, light, and very deadly.

“Sronn, you know how urgent is the levy of forced troops in the Javhovor's latest campaign. Can it be you have failed me, and used this poor rat's tail as an excuse?”

The sickness the use of the Power had left was fading quickly now.

“It is as he tells you,” I said.

The golden wolf's head jerked in my direction. In the gesture there was so much surprised disdain, I almost laughed at it.

“Be silent, desert bitch. You are nothing here.”

I knew his contempt—the contempt of the High One for the mere human. But it was he who was vulnerable. Two lances of pain stabbed behind my eyes. Around his neck the jade chain burst from its links, cracked, and fell in pieces on the marble floor. The soldiers went on their knees at once. But he was not so swift. He came toward me very slowly, and his voice was soft and dry.

“You do not know me, I see, or you wouldn't try your witch-tricks on me.”

I was not afraid. I felt it would be easy to match him, secure in my newfound hubris.

A foot from me, he stopped. Quickly the strong hands reached up to draw off the wolf mask. They believed too, it seemed, in the power of the unshielded eyes. And then, the mask was gone, and I saw his face.

“Darak,” I said.

My knees gave way at once, as if my body had been chopped in half. Ridiculously, I, to whom the soldiers kneeled, now kneeled involuntarily before this man I had meant to silence forever. But I could not touch him; he, as I, was already dead, already reborn. I had seen the Warden's men at Ankurum carry him from the feast hall, had seen his body hoisted on the gallows, swinging and empty. Yet here, as at the first, stood Darak, defying others' belief in my divinity, yet Darak, a little older, finer drawn, a prince sprung from the chrysalis of the bandit. Yet, now that I kneeled before him, I saw this was not quite Darak. And there was no recognition in his face, no knowledge, fascination, fear, scorn, love, or hate.

And suddenly my sense of strength left me. I began to weep. The soldiers looked up, startled, horrified. He they called Vazkor, who was Darak, turned from me in disgust.

“Could you do no better than that, Sronn?”

I leaned forward over myself, uncaring, my misery endless and unfathomable. I knew no longer what I must do. My hand found a piece of the broken jade, and I clutched it to me.

I heard an order called out, and was slightly aware of other men running in to seize the skull-soldiers I had ridden with. Then silence.

I sensed, at last, that he was sitting, half watching me, in one of the great ebony chairs. I could not understand why he had not already had me taken out; he did not believe in my immortality. Perhaps he had some crueler and more exquisite sport in store for me.

Finally he said, “They will be killed, the men who brought you. A pity. We shall need every man we possess for our war. Still, in a skirmish with the uncivilized Shlevakin from beyond Aluthmis, who can tell what will happen. The steaders' hovels will be burned down, naturally. Not a trace of your coming will remain. And now, Uastis, get up. This room is architecturally designed to please the eye, and your present position mars it for me.”

I seemed to have no choice. I rose slowly and stood, but could not look at him.

“I recall some human man to you, do I?” he asked me. “You must forget that, Uastis Reincarnate. You and I are not of that breed. Under the earth to grow, then from the sleep to the life. To rule. It is the heritage of the children of the Lost. Come here.”

Again I seemed to have no choice. I went to him. From inside the hem of the long tunic he drew a fine-bladed dagger. With it he scratched the surface of his right hand. A trickle of blood welled out, then stood like a red jewel on the instantly closing skin. A second more and the faint scar vanished, seeming to dissolve back into him.

“It is not hard, Uastis,” he said to me, “to recognize a sister.”

* * *

Life, circling endlessly on itself like a dark bird, carried me back to my core, without mercy.

It seems it should have been joy I felt to have found this “brother” in the world of humans. But I felt no joy. I felt nothing, only an overbearing sorrow and bewilderment I could not analyze or explain to myself. That I had found Darak again seemed least strange of all. I could not tell if it frightened or pleased me. Each time I thought of how he, Vazkor, High Commander of Ezlann, the Dark City, had drawn the golden wolf mask from his face, I could only cry, as I had not cried at Darak's death.

I was ill when I came to Ezlann, and half mad. My escort had been too awed to see it. But he saw, and he sent me away to a suite of apartments which at the time meant nothing to me, only a black quiet place in which to weep. Ten days perhaps. I remember there was a woman like a dark moth. She wore black and a black silk mask, not like the shireen. The mouth was covered over without an opening. I recollect I could not think how she would be able to eat, and being human, I thought she would starve. It became an obsession. I dreamed of her wasted body, hands clutching at food, holding it whimpering to the shuttered mouth, feebly, and without hope. Only later did I learn the customs of the Great Cities of the south.

A twilight era began, in which I rose and walked about the several oval rooms. I was not sure how many rooms there were, sometimes three, sometimes seven. Sometimes it seemed they were endless and without number. I bathed many times each day in the sunken bath of black marble, which seemed like a sleepy tomb, and was oddly pleasant to me. I looked often from the two long windows with which each of the rooms was graced. I could not understand the view—pale glow, soft white mists, dim golden columns, very thin and tall, and clusters of green foliage that shed a constant and unchanging viridian light into the rooms. There were no sunsets and no dawns. There was no time at all.

It was a long while later that I began to see my apartments for what they were.

There were four rooms in all, each oval, and each similar to the one preceding and the one following. They were built in a circular chain about an inner space onto which the tall windows looked, and one could therefore pass from the first room to the second, from the second to the third, from the third to the fourth, and from the fourth back into the original and first. Each was hung and ornamented in costly black materials. Black smooth onyx things stood ready to be caressed, carvings of animals and swans. A black and muted silver mosaic on the floor, black gauze draperies. On the ebony tables, the sudden white luminance of huge alabaster lamps, which the woman lit each night from golden tapers. Beyond my windows, a petrified garden of carved green jade, glowing and misty from unimaginable sources. How the rooms were ventilated, I do not know. There was no access to the open except the single door through which the woman came. I examined it in her absence and found it to be locked. There were two small grooves on the surface; I touched them but there was no response. I was shut, like a rare insect, into a beautiful prison, and left there to be observed, perhaps passionlessly dissected at my keeper's will.

A new obsession grew on me—that there was some hidden means for watching me. I questioned the woman, and found she would not answer. In frustrated anger I struck her across the face. It might have been a doll I struck.

The day after that—I say a day, I mean one of those unknown units that followed sleep—she brought me undergarments, a long dress of black silk with tight waist and sleeves, a girdle of golden links each shaped like a three-winged leaf, and a golden mask with the face of a cat. She set them down on my bed and left me at once.

When she was gone, I examined these things, mostly the mask. It was very beautiful and lifelike. Around the wide-rimmed eyes were set translucent green gems, and there were no glass eye-pieces to hide the human organs behind them. The pointed ears were hung with swinging, clashing earrings of golden drops and discs, each with a nugget of emerald burning dependent at the center. From the crown of the mask hung long tails of stiff gold threads, plaited to resemble hair.

There was no mirror in the apartments, which had pleased me, I, who never dared look in one. Now, almost hypnotized by these strange clothes, I longed for the means to see myself dressed in this way. Yet I did not dress. I stood, naked as I had been since waking here, afraid of a possession overcoming me.

I walked to the door and tried it for the thousandth time. It did not yield.

I went to bathe.

I lay a long while in the scented water, then rose at last, and found the woman had come back. She dried me, then held out the black silk dress. It seemed very natural then that I should put it on, and the golden belt also. Now the mask was in her hands. I took it, and at once she hid her eyes in her palms and turned away.

I tore the hated shireen from my face, and put on the mask of the cat.

Incredible, it was beaten so thin and fine it rested on my face lighter than a shadow. The golden plaits swung into my hair. A new strength flowed into me. At once I felt as I had done on the causeway, when I had said to Vazkor's men, “Will you kill me again?”

I caught the woman's shoulder so hard she cried out at the pain.

“Take me through the door.”

Somehow she squirmed from my grasp, and ran away from me, but I caught her at the door as she opened it with a sideways pressure of her smallest fingers in the two grooves I had noted earlier. The door swung open. I seized her arm and went through to the other side, pulling her with me as my captive.

3

Beyond the rooms, a dark corridor, shimmering like glass, glass globe-lamps set in the walls.

I pushed her down it, walking a little behind her now, an edge of her sleeve in my fingers. At the end of the corridor a single arch filled by a gold-worked curtain. We went through into another black room, this time very vast, echoing, and oddly chill with size. Enormous basalt columns reared toward the ceiling. It was utterly dark, only one tiny glowing point of light elusive between the pillars, some way ahead.

Suddenly my hand was seized and pulled from the woman. A shadow slid closer to me, and turned me toward itself, even as she fled from me, swift as the moth she resembled.

“So, you're ready now,” Vazkor said.

His voice, the voice of Darak, had grown strange to me in the time I had not been with him. I could not see his face, yet I could feel the pressure of his hand on mine.

“Come with me,” he said.

I could not bear the touch of his familiar-unfamiliar hand. I drew mine away.

“Where is this place? And what is it?”

“Come with me, and I can show you.”

He walked away from me, expecting me to follow, but it was hard to do it in the blackness, now that I did not have his hand to guide me. I had felt sure enough before I found him here. Now I was not so sure. There was a fierce terror in me that his being would absorb mine; I had known this fear with Darak but neither so intensely nor in a manner so self-understood.

We stood in an aisle, slightly sloping upward. Down the aisle, onto our closed faces of wolf and cat, the dull light filtered. There was a tall veiled shape—a statue of gold, glittering faintly under its covering. Before it, the block of an altar from which rose a great basalt cup. In the cup, a flickering, ever-changing light.

How well-known to me.

Here was Karrakaz. So near. Yet I heard no voice, felt no sensation.

“Here then,” I whispered.

“An ancient altar,” he said. “I have kept the flame burning for them, as it burns in all the great temples of the Cities.”

He went close to it. I followed him. I stared in at the twisting, phosphorescent flame. Did he have no sense of Evil near him?

“Look up,” he said.

I drew my eyes away, looked instead at the statue, and saw a metal woman in a black dress and the golden mask of a cat.

“You understand nothing,” he said. I thought I heard a slight contemptuous pleasure in his voice. “I must teach you about yourself. Goddess.”

* * *

So he taught me—their customs, their beliefs, their dark dreamings, and his own ambition which was to be mine as well. And he taught me how he would use me as the instrument of his power, like an ax, to hew out the way for him. Yet he taught me also, without intending it, that he feared me and my sudden coming, that he feared I should in the end be more than he was. And he taught me to fear him, too.