by Kay Hooper
Serena hesitated, then said softly, “You must be hungry by now, aren’t you? I know you’re awake. Won’t you at least look at me—and tell me your name?”
After a long moment the girl’s eyes opened and focused on Serena’s face. They were wide, blue, and shadowed, and her voice was innately gentle and very wary when she said, “I’m Roxanne. Who are you?”
“My name is Serena.”
Roxanne turned her head just slightly and flicked a tense glance toward the fire and Merlin. “And … him?”
“His name is Merlin,” Serena answered, keeping her voice soft. “He helped you.”
“He’s a wizard,” Roxanne said.
“Yes.”
“Then he wouldn’t have helped me.” Her voice held absolute conviction.
Serena frowned slightly. “He did help you, Roxanne. I watched him heal your injuries.”
Slowly Roxanne pushed herself into a sitting position, her wary gaze leaving Merlin—who hadn’t moved or reacted in any way to what was happening in the lean-to even though he had certainly heard their voices—and studying Serena no less warily. The blanket fell to her waist, and she looked down at her clean, untorn clothing. She lifted one hand to her hair, finding it clean and in a neat braid down her back like Serena’s. Slender fingers probed her face, and a look of confusion tightened her features.
“I was dying,” she whispered. “I know I was. They had used me and left me to die. No one could have saved me, not even a Master wizard.”
Serena remembered then that Merlin had said the wizards of Atlantis were less advanced than their modern counterparts, and thought quickly for a plausible explanation. “We’re visitors here. Where we come from, Merlin is renowned as a gifted healer. He’s devoted much study to the art of healing.”
Roxanne seemed to accept that, but her eyes were still distrustful and puzzled when she stared at Serena. “You’re powerless. Are you his concubine?”
Finding a compromise between a label she refused to wear and the complicated truth, Serena said, “I’m … his companion. Look, why don’t I get you something to eat, all right? You must be hungry.”
“Thank you,” Roxanne said quietly.
Serena eased away and returned to the fire, where the remainder of their stew was being kept warm on a flat rock close to the flames.
“My companion?” Merlin murmured.
Ladling stew into a bowl, Serena shot him a glance and kept her own voice low. “Like you said, we’re strangers here. Just because everybody we meet assumes I’m your property doesn’t mean I have to accept it. Companion is a nice, neutral word, and I much prefer it to concubine.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. But there’s something you should keep in mind, Serena. In their language the word companion may not be neutral at all.”
Unnerved by that possibility, Serena carried the bowl of stew and a spoon back to Roxanne. Along with everything else, now she had to worry about how her words translated. Great. She frequently got into trouble with English; what kinds of linguistic pits yawned at her feet now?
She knelt and handed the food to Roxanne, returning the girl’s guarded look with a touch of wariness herself. “Do you live in the city?” she asked.
After tasting the stew tentatively, Roxanne obviously found her appetite and began eating, but she didn’t take her eyes off Serena. “Yes … Sanctuary.”
“Sanctuary? That’s what it’s called?” It seemed a fitting name for a walled city, Serena thought.
“Yes. Where are you from?”
Serena hesitated, but then opted for the truth. Why not, after all? No one here could possibly recognize the name—and besides, it probably translated as so much gibberish. “It’s a city called Seattle.”
“I’ve never heard of that. It’s across the ocean?”
“Yes, far away. We—Merlin and I—wanted to see a bit more of the world.”
Roxanne’s delicate lips twisted. “And you came to Atlantia?”
“It seemed a good idea at the time,” Serena murmured. “Your customs are no doubt different from ours, and it’s always interesting to encounter a different culture.”
After a wary glance toward Merlin, Roxanne said, “He may find Atlantia to his liking. Men, especially wizards, have the best of things here. But you may wish you had not left your Seattle.”
“Why?”
“Because women are ultimately powerless here. Even wizards like me. What happened to me in the night happens to many women, thanks to the Mountain Lords.” Her voice dripped contempt and hatred when she named the male wizards, the emotions so strong that Serena leaned back.
“The male wizards? They … hurt you last night?”
Roxanne offered a painful smile. “If you mean were they the ones who rutted like animals between my legs, no. Village men—powerless men—did that. For all their arrogance, no male wizard would dare attempt to take his pleasure with a woman of power.”
Baffled, Serena said, “Why not?”
“Because she would kill him, of course,” Roxanne replied a bit impatiently. “We may be lesser in power compared to most of them, but any female wizard who is taken against her will is quite capable of destroying even the mightiest male. It’s the one time we’re able to defeat them.”
Serena knew she looked as confused as she felt. “I don’t understand this. Powerless men hurt you last night?”
“Yes.”
“And you couldn’t fight them? Couldn’t stop them?”
“No, of course not. It was night.”
“What does that have to do with it?”
Roxanne looked briefly confused herself, but then her frown cleared. “It must be different in Seattle, as it once was here. Now we are unable to use our powers at night. From sunset to sunrise the Curtain makes all in the valley powerless.”
SEVEN
The lean-to was on the right and slightly behind Merlin, far enough away that the girl wouldn’t feel unduly threatened by his presence, Merlin thought, but close enough so that he could hear every word spoken there.
What he heard was hardly reassuring, but he listened nonetheless.
It was nearly an hour later when Serena returned to the fire, her face a bit drawn. She was carrying Roxanne’s empty bowl, and set it near the fire absently before she sat down on the stump she had earlier used for a seat.
“She’s asleep again. It seemed to hit her all at once.”
Merlin nodded. “Delayed shock. The next time she wakes, I doubt she’ll seem so calm.”
“I wondered about that. She seemed … almost detached about what had happened to her.”
“Waking to find herself uninjured and with her memory of what had happened to her somewhat distant, she wasn’t forced to deal with the trauma immediately. Since we were here, strangers, she was able to concentrate on us. Explaining some of the traits of this place kept her mind off herself. It was a healthy enough response.”
“But temporary?”
“She’ll have to deal with what happened to her sooner or later.”
Serena was silent for a moment, then said, “Is that coffee you’re drinking? Do they have coffee here?”
“Yes, it is coffee, and no, they don’t have it here. I’m cheating.” Merlin gazed broodingly into his mug. “Would you like some?”
“Please.”
He conjured a mug of coffee for Serena—fixed with cream and sugar, the way she always drank it—directly into her grasp without even looking at her.
“I’m always impressed when you do that,” she murmured.
Merlin felt too unsettled to respond to her light tone. Instead he said, “At least now we know why Roxanne was unable to defend herself against her attackers.”
“I suppose it’s useless to hope we won’t be affected the way they are,” Serena ventured.
“Probably. If this Curtain does indeed reflect energy at the wizard who tries to use it, we’re vulnerable to it as well.”
Serena spoke slowly. “She said it also
drains them. That it depletes more than their excess energy. If that’s so, men like those three we met could overpower even the strongest wizard during the night. So why haven’t they? I mean, if the powerless men resent wizards as strongly as you felt with those three, then why don’t they get together one night and—”
Merlin shook his head. “It isn’t that simple, I think. The male wizards live high in the mountains, remember? I very much doubt that many of them venture down here often, if at all, and never once the sun sets. Judging by what we saw this morning, the Curtain blankets only the valley. In the mountains the wizards are above it, and probably beyond its effects.”
“Then why don’t the women move up there?” Serena’s voice was a bit tense. “The female wizards, like Roxanne. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to her—and the answer is so simple. Why do they remain down here, where their powers are drained night after night? Where they’re vulnerable?”
Merlin turned his head slowly and looked at her strained features. He had hoped they could avoid talking about this until there was more information, until he found some painless way of dealing with it, but Roxanne’s matter-of-fact words were undoubtedly echoing in Serena’s mind just the way they were resounding in his.
… no male wizard would dare attempt to take his pleasure with a woman of power…. she would kill him….
That was what Serena wanted to talk about, he knew. Roxanne had drawn an ugly picture of the battle going on between male and female wizards with a few brief but stark sentences, and that was so alien to what Serena knew of wizards that it was deeply troubling to her.
How much time did he have before she figured out why they were here? Not much, Merlin thought. She was a highly intelligent woman, and even now her mind must be filled with a jumble of impressions and speculations.
But he still didn’t want to cope with this right now. Roxanne’s intense hatred of the male wizards had shaken him very much, because it told him just how ominous the situation was. And his own reaction to the knowledge of a city filled with women of power was just as troubling. Even now he was struggling against the negative feelings.
“Richard?”
Returning his gaze to the mug in his hands, Merlin said unemotionally, “You heard Roxanne. The males are more powerful. The mountains must be their strongholds; so far they’ve apparently been able to keep the women down here in the valley.”
“But why?”
Because female wizards are capable of destroying males—if only when they are taken against their will? Did this hate and mistrust come about because too many females were raped and too many males paid for the crime with their lives?
“I don’t know why,” he said evenly. “Any answer I could offer would be sheer speculation.”
“Then speculate.” Serena nearly snapped out the words.
“On the basis of what?” His tone was a bit snappy as well. “We’ve encountered three village men and one traumatized female wizard—hardly a representative sampling of the population. Roxanne’s hatred for the male wizards may be more unique than she’s led us to believe; those three men could have been mutant individuals rather than the norm; and the male wizards may have taken to the mountains simply to escape the Curtain or combative females. I—we—just don’t know enough yet even to speculate, Serena.”
She drew an audible breath. “You asked me to trust you, to accept this little trip of ours without posing too many questions, and I agreed to that. But I didn’t agree to stop thinking, Richard.”
Merlin heard something in her voice he’d never heard before, not hostility but something very close, and he found it both disturbing and painful. For all her occasional arguments and minor defiances through the years, Serena had never been in any way antagonistic toward him. Was it only because of Roxanne’s bitter words, or did the very atmosphere of Atlantis kindle suspicion in everyone exposed to it?
He turned his head slowly and looked at her. She was clearly as tense as she sounded, as tense as he felt himself, and he knew he had to tread carefully. “I never asked you to stop thinking,” he said quietly.
“Then don’t ask me not to think about all this.”
“Think what you like, Serena. But be careful in drawing conclusions. Remember your own analogy? This place is like a jigsaw puzzle; we won’t know what the picture is until we have all the pieces assembled.”
After a long moment she looked away from his steady gaze. Her features were still a bit strained, but her eyes were not so much wary now as uneasy. “The sun’s going down. We … aren’t going to transport up into the mountains to get away from the Curtain, are we?”
“To understand this place, we should experience as much as possible. Even the Curtain. And until we see one of the wizards here transport, it’s one ability we won’t be using. They may not believe they can fly any more than the powerless people of this time believe they can.”
“Then I have a suggestion,” she said. “Before the sun goes down, maybe you should conjure up a couple of guns.”
Merlin shook his head reluctantly. “Cheating with coffee or blankets is one thing; we can’t bring devices from our time into this world, even to protect ourselves. The risk of changing the future is too great.”
She didn’t argue with him; she didn’t even seem surprised by what he said. She simply looked at him and said, “In that case I think I’ll go and find myself a couple of really big, heavy sticks.”
“That might be a very good idea,” he conceded.
She felt hideously uncomfortable, Serena decided. The sense of being in an alien place seemed multiplied at night, with the unfamiliar night sounds and the queer faint shudders of the earth beneath her body. She noticed the latter only when she lay down to sleep, those almost imperceptible pulses in the ground that were even more frightening than the earlier earthquake because they were continuous reminders of instability. And the Curtain.
When she had sat near the fire with Merlin just after dark, both of them gazing up at the luminescent mist thickening in the air above the air above the valley and nearly hiding the full moon just on the wane, Serena had managed to feel a bit detached, marveling as the visible spillover of wizards’ energies took on a life of its own. But with every passing hour, as the sky darkened to a peculiar blood red and seemed to pulse with energy, she felt more uncomfortable, lethargic and weak, until finally she bade Merlin a quiet good night and went to join the sleeping Roxanne in the larger of the two lean-to’s.
She would have preferred to remain with him, to talk about what they had so far learned about Atlantis, but Merlin had made it clear he had no intention of speculating until they had more information. At least that was what he said. Serena knew it wasn’t that simple. She didn’t have to read his mind to know that he was deeply disturbed by what information they had already, and he had withdrawn from her again, retreating behind his remote mask to keep distance between them.
The truth, Serena thought, was that he didn’t want to discuss some of what they’d learned because it cut too close to them and to the tension between them.
Neither of them had actually mentioned what Roxanne had said regarding male and female wizards—that they apparently never engaged in sex together—but Serena couldn’t stop thinking about it…. no male wizard would dare attempt to take his pleasure with a woman of power. Even when there was no force? When it was not merely sex, but lovemaking? Were there no wizards capable of trusting each other enough to mate?
That question troubled Serena more than all the others, causing her to consider her relationship with Merlin in an entirely different light. She knew no wizards other than him in their time; if she had known others, would she have seen the same male/female segregation in their society? Was it considered normal even in their time? And was her relationship with Merlin so tense and tentative now for that very reason—because an unthreatening girl child had become a woman he could never trust?
Was the “boundary” he had told her they mustn’t cross an uncomp
romising and ancient line born out of hate and suspicion, created to divide not Master and Apprentice, but male and female wizards?
The questions and thoughts followed Serena into a shallow, restless sleep, the last sight to meet her eyes that of Merlin sitting by the fire, his face turned upward as he studied the shifting, glistening Curtain. When she woke abruptly, the fire had burned out, Merlin was not visible—probably sleeping in his own lean-to—and Roxanne lay stiffly beside her.
Serena’s instincts told her more than her clouded senses, and she put a gentle hand on the younger woman’s rigid arm. “It’s all right,” she murmured. “Cry if you need to. Grieve. Get mad about it. Then you can really begin to heal.”
Roxanne did cry, almost silently but with such intensity that her slender body shuddered beneath the force of her pain and grief and rage. Serena didn’t attempt to soothe or stop her; she merely provided a willing shoulder and compassionate silence.
Exhausted at last, Roxanne slept, but Serena lay awake for a long time. She realized she was listening tensely to the unfamiliar night sounds of Atlantis, that being reminded of what had happened to Roxanne had made her nervous and more than a little frightened—enough so that sleep was not going to come easily. Packs composed of some of the village men hunted most nights, Roxanne had told her, hopeful of finding a careless female wizard who had strayed too far from Sanctuary and had gotten caught by the night and the Curtain.
It was all because the male wizards had, long ago, created the fiction that by possessing a female wizard sexually, a powerless man could acquire some of her power.
“Never mind that it isn’t true,” Roxanne had said bitterly. “The males made it seem true by gifting an occasional rapist with a little bit of power—not enough to hurt the males, of course. They still do it sometimes, still reward the rape of a female wizard. So we’re all vulnerable at night.”