The Birthgrave (59 page)

Out of the cloudiness things grew, and took on meaning. White swans moving across glittering water, stretching out their looping necks to be fed. A woman with long pale hair, who led me by the hand through ornate gardens leading to the sea, over the floors of incredible rooms where elegant men and women sat. Sometimes there would be others, large, uncouth, staring, dirty, their bodies brown and scarred. They made me afraid, for they were not like us. Like savage, ugly animals, they haunted the walks, their figures contorted to dig at the beds of flowers. Our slaves.

I must not speak to them, but I did, one, a man slave, axing down a slender tree. I asked him why he did it.

“The tree is diseased, princess,” he said, in the awkward grumble with which they stumbled out our tongue. Then he stared down at me from his great height. His face was hideous, distorted by a pain I could not understand, for he was smiling. “All diseased things,” he said, “must be cut down. And burned.” His eyes ate their way into mine. Frightened, I backed from him, and in that moment the prince who was my father came. The slave's face altered to a look of moronic terror. The prince picked me up with one arm. With the other he summoned the four guards who came behind him. Two seized the man and brought him down on his face. Another stripped his shirt. A fourth stood ready, a metal-edged whip dripping from his hands.

“Now kill him,” said my father, stroking my hair. “But slowly. My royal daughter must see what happens to all those who dare insult us.”

The whip rose and fell monotonously. The man screamed and flopped and blood wriggled in the grass like snakes. I was glad at first, but soon I grew bored. I looked at my father's soldiers, and they too were slaves, though, better treated and better clothed, they looked very different. It did not seem to matter to them that they whipped one of their own kind.

Soon the man died, and my father took me away.

* * *

Three years and many days of lily-lakes, marble-pillared rooms, entertainments of death and beauty. Then fear came. At first fear was only a transparent shadow thrown in the distance, a whisper, something hidden behind layers of thought and activity. Then fear grew deeper and closer, and lay inside the mouth, ready to be hinted at and half-spoken.

To begin with, I did not know the fear, only sensed it. I heard the word “plague” and it meant nothing to me. I heard of death, but that I rejected totally. We would live almost forever. Nothing could harm us. We were not slaves to die from sickness or a wound.

But then, a scarlet dawn, and my mother's sister screaming and screaming, running through the palace walks naked, her pale hair flaming behind her, an insanity of whiteness against the blood-red sky. Her lover was dead of the Plague, had died lying across her. She had woken to find him, his flesh decomposing against hers. I did not know what was done, but, as the days passed. I came to know, for others died. A pyre was built beyond the lake, and here what remained of them, and of their clothes, was burned. If the corpse was discovered quickly enough, slaves could be sent in to make a cast of the body, and this would be painted and decked in jewels and buried in the owner's tomb in place of their flesh. But often it was too late for that; the body would already be putrescent. And this was why the Plague was so damaging to us, for nothing would remain to heal itself, not flesh or sinew or any organ, not the brain, not even the bones. True annihilation had come among us at last.

There were no symptoms of the Plague in its victims before they succumbed to the coma, therefore, no warning. And the infection spread like rottenness.

My mother died. I could not understand why she should leave me. I was terrified, and wept with terror, not sorrow, as I walked behind her jeweled bier—empty, for she had been too quick for them. I stared at the painted pictures of her tomb deep in the vaults of the palace. The sleeping woman-shape under the mountain with its sky cloud, which was the symbol of birth and of the planet which supported it; the woman with her guard, and rods of office, a symbol of her temporal power; the woman holding the knife toward herself, symbol of her final acceptance of death. I hated these terrible paintings—the same in every tomb, save that in a man's sepulcher a drawn man would replace the woman in them. I hated the traditional jade set in at the face, as though death had made my mother faceless.

My father came to me at dusk. The low lamplight picked out the small luminous triangle of green above and between his eyes, as he leaned toward my bed.

“Tomorrow you must be up early,” he said. “We are going on a journey.”

“Where?”

“To a place, a place underground, a temple. We shall be safe there.”

* * *

The summer too was dead, and rains and winds blew across the land as we traveled from the northern shore. Drifts of bronze leaves stagnated on the rivers and the lakes.

Members of other great houses came with us. The slaves drove our wagons, put up our tents at night, and saw to our needs much as they had done in our palaces. None of them took the Plague, nor did they seem to fear it. Only one man tried to run away. From my wagon flap I watched him blunder on spindly legs across the harvested fields of some village. One of the princes turned and looked hard at the running man. The man fell immediately, and did not rise. The power to kill had not come to me yet, nor the power to levitate my body from the ground. The slaves watched in terror any of us who did this: in their own abominable tongue they called us the Winged Ones, imagining we must have invisible wings, and that we flew.

A princess died on the fifth day of our journey. And, at a little mud-brick town they called Sirrainis, my father's almost whole body was burned on the branches of forest trees.

My mother's sister, who still lived, became my formal guardian, though she was frowned on for she had taken one of the human guard for her lover. To me he seemed as disgusting and as ugly as the rest, though he pleased her well enough.

Two days later we reached the mountain under which the temple lay. I did not fully comprehend the notion of gods, but that my people had occasionally worshiped them had always been vaguely apparent to me. The great offering cups of the palace, holding always their undying flame, were the symbol of prayers unspoken. As in the tomb paintings, the mountain was the sign of the earth which had bred our might. It had seemed fitting to them, therefore, to hollow out their holy places under mountains, or rather to have them hollowed out by the slaves.

It was a black frowning height, which seemed to offer no comfort. Beyond the massive doors, dimly lit corridors and stairs had been chipped from the dark rock. White-robed men in golden masks chanted in a cavern about a huge rough-hewn stone bowl, fountaining flame. Dismal, cold, unwholesome place. I cried myself to sleep in my little rock cell, as I would cry myself to sleep for half a year.

* * *

In the first months there were few deaths from the Plague. Those few were consigned to a blazing crater higher in the mountain, reached by a narrow stair above the cavern. This crater, the white-robed men told us, was all that remained of the volcano it had once been. They were priests, these men, though they had not been so for long, perhaps. They gave an impression of impermanence, and stumbled sometimes over their chanting. They were of our race, and walked like the princes.

Our toll being lighter, a kind of optimism came. It seemed the holiness of the temple had indeed granted us sanctuary. We went three times each day to offer prayers to the nebulous gods I could not comprehend. Adults and children alike, we kneeled in the icy cavern about the bowl with the flame, entreating forgiveness for the hubris which had angered them. This also made no sense to me. Who were we to beg and wail on our knees, who had been masters of all men?

Apart from the prayers, there was little to fill my time. No entertainments were allowed. They gave me books to read, which I did not manage well for again they spoke of our gods. Some, the writings of princes and princesses, told only of our offenses and our punishment Those who admitted their guilt, however, might be saved, might escape even after the coma of death had claimed them, sleeping, but not dying, awaking whole after some indefinite period of time, to reclaim their powers.

I wandered most of the day about the gut of the mountain, straying into forbidden rooms where the priests' robes hung, up great flights of stairs, into dark places which frightened me.

Chief among the priests was the prince called Sekish. I feared and hated him. He wore a scarlet robe, and, while many of our people were very fair, Sekish was dark-skinned and black-haired. Tall and gaunt, his shadow fell black across me as he stood before my mother's sister and berated her for her human lover.

“You choose beneath you,” he snarled. “You bring the anger of the Powerful Ones upon us all.”

“You are what I should choose, perhaps, Sekish?” she said, and I cowered for her. But he straightened, the green triangle above and between his eyes glinting like the third eye of his contempt. He turned and left her, and three days later he pronounced a ban on slaves. Either they left the mountain, or they would be killed. They went gladly, her lover among them. He was her talisman against death, it seemed to me, and, after four months of hope, she was the first new victim of the Plague.

Within a space of seven days, ten more were dead. Hysteria broke out within the mountain, and Sekish, the Dark One, walked among us, boring into our souls with his narrow black eyes, telling us to pray, to repent, to acknowledge our wickedness, and the evil which we had created, and which had returned to destroy us.

From morning to night now the chants of self-abasement before the stone bowl. The fine clothing, the jewelry, were put away. Men and women walked with their hair loose about them, in plain shifts and tunics, beating at themselves with rods until blood ran, beating again as soon as the swiftly healing wounds had closed. Everywhere the sound of terror, frenzied contrition, despair, as the lords of men groveled on their knees.

“Karrakaz,” I whispered before the flame in the bowl, my body stiff and aching, “I am the evil on the earth's face, I am the blight, the diseased thing, the filthy, the accursed.”

Around me others whispered as I did. Clouds of whispering rose like steam. I thought of the statue of my father in the hall of his palace, the glossy stuff of which it was made, how I had laughed to see both him and it stand side by side, two identical men, short-bearded, long-haired. Now the statue would be all that was left of him. I began to cry. I buried my face in my hands, forgetting my chant of self-sin, until the black cold shadow of Sekish lay dank on me.

“Yes, child, weep,” he cried out in his terrible voice. “Weep for your maggot birth, and the foulness which is in you, the foulness which your mother and father allowed to grow from their lusts.” He leaned closer and seized my arm. Around us the chanting faltered and ceased. “But you do not weep for that, I see. It is a rebellious child, daring to dream of its damned past. This child may bring Their wrath on us.” Eyes stared at me. He dragged me nearer to the huge stone bowl, and the flame slashed his face with color. He held me facing that fire, and leaning close, he hissed into my ear: “You are filthy, you are evil, the spawn of evil, the womb of evil. The Power in you is corrupt, horrible. The full Power—pray, pray never to attain it! Hubris, wickedness, ugliness, evil. You are the dirt of the dark places, dung of monsters in the pit of lust. Speak it.
Speak it.”

In terror. I limped after him.

“I am filthy . . . evil . . . Power is corrupt, horrible . . . I will pray never to attain it!”

Over and over again the ghastly words were spewed as he held me before the flame in his iron hands. I repented that I had thought of my father. I did not understand, but I learned. I became degraded and filthy. I shriveled and twisted and was damned.

When he let me down, I ran to my cell and curled myself together, hiding my face and as much of my body as I could from any awareness in the room. I felt the watching eyes of gods upon me, judging and condemning. Could I doubt that I would die also now, my flesh dripping from my bones in the dark?

Yet I woke to my misery with the new day. Sekish lay before the stone bowl, what there remained of him.

After Sekish there was no other leader. Yet we did not need one, our own guilt and fear was leader enough.

In that last month, death stripped us, until only a handful remained, eight or nine princes and princesses of the great houses of the north, and a handful of priests. If any lived outside our shelter, we had no word, neither any hope of it. The earth had snatched her gifts from us, given herself back to the human savages who had once possessed her.

And then the thunder came which set the final seal on our darkness. Deep within itself the sleeping mountain had stirred and trembled. Upper galleries of the temple had fallen, leaving in their wake staircases which now led nowhere, their platforms shorn away, rooms hollowed out by collapsing rocks. Where it finally settled, the debris had blocked the great air funnels built into the mountain. Now the air that meant life and food to us could no longer enter, and the air which remained grew stale and poisonous.

One by one they fell into the sleep of suffocation, and one by one, as they lay in their rooms like pale embalmed dolls with stopped clockwork hearts, the Plague came and melted them into wax.

I wandered the silent temple slowly, panting, and sobbing when I had enough breath for it. I watched them die. There are no words for the emotions in me as I lingered, waiting to follow them to their disgusting end.

There was a princess, and she remained whole longer than the rest. She lay in her trance, her white hair spread around her, her straight white limbs bright under the thin robe. Between her breasts glistened a drop of diamond—the gift of some long-dead lover—which she had not taken off even in her agonies of repentance. Each day I would drag myself to her cell, and sit by her on the floor, holding her limp hand as if this were a protection and a comfort.