by Tanith Lee
The baby no longer screamed. It was little better than dead, and dangled from the jackal’s mouth like a disjointed doll. Nevertheless, the hermit-priest, with that curious understanding common to his kind, felt emanating from it the faintest flickering of life.
He stood quite still and said to the jackal: “My brother, I am sorry to deny you, but what you carry still lives, and therefore you have no right to it.”
The jackal pricked its ears, and its eyes met the eyes of the priest. What it saw there, only the jackal knew, but it laid down the baby very carefully, shook its forefeet as if ridding them of dust or blame and ran to join the other three at their grisly but blameless feast.
The priest went and took up the child. He looked at its wounds and covered it over with his cloak and strode quickly homewards. There, in the cave, he tended it, set its poor broken limbs as best he could, although he knew its arms could never now grow straight, and doctored the terrible disfigurement of its minute face, and gave it a medicine to drink mixed with goats’ milk. He worked skillfully and with compassion. He did not waste any time in lament or useless anger, though the state of the child might have moved anyone to either or both. He had a ruthless tenderness. He wept neither for the dead nor the living. He did what he could, and trusted that the gods, also, would do as much.
While she was a little girl, Zorashad’s daughter was happy enough, though in a curious way, compatible with her surroundings and manner of existence. For life in the cave was calm, oblique and absorbing, and she learned there calm, oblique, absorbing lessons—the skills of the clean earth magic which the priest practiced. She learned too those channels of magic she must beware—sorcery, necromancy, all those avenues which men approached at risk of sanity, soul and ego itself, but she saw them only like a row of black doorways, forever closed, and had no desire to knock on them or find out keys.
During this time she was ignorant of herself, as only a creature lost in external things can be. Indeed, she was hardly conscious of herself—she was all ear and eye and thought. She had never seen into a mirror, never looked at her marred face; she had never wept in outraged horror at the scarred and twisted flesh, nor marvelled bitterly at the cream-smooth brow, the large eyes and copper hair which her perverse destiny had left her. Despite her crippled arms, her body was beautiful; she never noticed it, it made few demands. And though sometimes these arms, warped like winter trees, would gnaw and burn with pain, she never cried out in anger at the fate which made her suffer it. Through her short life she had suffered intermittently so, and there was always the gentle priest with his salve, and the leopard with its torn side wounded more sorely than she. All her days were elements, sun, snow, shadow, wind, clear water, blowing grass, the gathering of herbs, the making of spells, the serene hours of lessons. All her nights were warm dark red coals on the hearth, and golden coals of beast eyes smouldering softly.
Sometimes the priest would go on a journey and would not take her, but she did not mind this. He left her behind to care for their home, to tend any animals who might come there. She had never spoken to a human, save for the priest. He had made sure of that, knowing, without rancour, how the human tribe might treat her. When men and women came to the cave for aid, she peeped at them through the curtain with the fox and the bear, and only the priest went out. She had a sort of innocence, a sweetness, despite her deformities, that sprang from an uncrippled brain and an open heart. She had never been censured, ridiculed, reviled, hated.
One day, when she was fifteen, the priest was from home. He had gone to pray over the crops of the villages. At noon, when she was mixing herbs in the cave, she heard the sound of horses’ hooves outside, and went quickly to look out from her hiding place. No one before had ever come when the priest was away, for the villagers knew the times of his absences and they feared the cave and the wild beasts. Yet these visitors had not traveled from any village or lonely farm. Even she, who had never seen such worldly magnificence before, recognized it instinctively when she saw it, and she was very awed.
Ten horses stood outside, fretting, white or ebony, and caparisoned in gold and silver. Each had a rider, all dressed in a radiance of silk, metal and jewels as bright as the moon, but the young man who sat his horse in front of them was to her like the sun itself.
She never dreamed that he would speak, supposed he would simply pass on, as the sun does, illuminating but not communicating with the world.
When he called out suddenly, it frightened her, for it seemed too real.
“You there, hermit,” he cried scornfully, “come and heal us for we are sick.”
And the whole company laughed uproariously.
Zorashad’s daughter stared out through the curtain at him, and a new sensation took hold of her. She guessed abruptly that he mocked the priest, and had come here only for that purpose, but this was a little thing compared to the fascination the sight of the young man exerted over her. All at once, his reality, his mockery even, excited her. He was wondrous, but actual. A part of the earth she knew. She became all joy, all amazement. She had asked nothing from the leopard, only to worship and tend him, and he had suffered her without flinching. Now she asked only to worship the young man on the white horse.
Compelled, unconsidering, unaware of self, all ear and eye and thought, she came out of the cave and stood on the slope, gazing up at him.
Her ugliness, of which she had never been told, was so frightful that the young riders drew back in alarm. But presently the beautiful young man, who was a king and a king’s son, realizing that she was, though vile and crippled, only human, halted and laughed again.
“Gods of Upper Air defend us!” he cried, “what apparition is this?”
Then, seeing her large eyes fixed on him, and becoming uneasy after all, he demanded:
“What are you staring at, you stupid monster?”
“At you,” said she, “because you are so fair.”
She spoke without apology or embarrassment, in her spontaneous gentle way. But one of the king’s companions shouted:
“Don’t trust her. She wants to blast you, my lord, to make you as hideous as herself. Surely she is a demoness, and has the ill-eye. Her arms are crooked as sticks.”
At this the king took up his whip, and slashed her across the cheek and neck with it. Zorashad’s daughter fell down without a word.
“One scar more will make no odds to that face,” the king told her. “Go masked in future, or you’ll sour the wine in the skin, and the milk in the cow, and break every looking glass in the land.”
She had always been quick to learn; it had been her talent. Now she learned quickly too.
The king rode away into the woods with his friends to chase the deer with arrows, and Zorashad’s daughter lay where she was, with the pain of the whip still raking her cheek. and the pain of that other whip, worse than the first, the whip of his cruel tongue, raking her heart.
This was how the priest found her when he came back in the dusk with the fireflies wooing his lamp.
He saw some great misfortune had fallen on her; no doubt he guessed well enough the nature of it. It had been only good luck that he had shielded her so long from herself. Besides, he was old now, and could not protect her for ever. He asked no questions. but stroked her hair a little while, then went in and made up the fire. Soon she followed him, and raised her dreadful face to his.
“Why,” she said softly, “did you never tell me what I am?”
“You are yourself,” he said. “What more need you know?”
“No, I am not myself, for always I thought myself the same as the rest of human-kind. Now I learn I am a monster, with an appearance to laugh and tremble at, and twisted limbs—a man came here today and told me so, and when he was gone, I looked at myself freshly, and I went to the pool and waited there till the ripples were still, and so I saw all he had said, and worse. If you found me at birth, why did you not kill me? Why leave me to suffer this?”
“That was not my choice,
” said the priest, “but yours. If you cannot bear to live as you are, you know enough to mix yourself a drink to end all sorrow, and I will not prevent you, though I should grieve at it.”
At this the girl wept, for she loved life as do most living things who have known a little freedom and happiness in the world.
The priest comforted her, and said:
“Sit here, and I will tell you something of yourself. You are not whole, for you have no past, no reason to explain your burdens and your misery. This I will give you. Then you shall decide what is to be done.”
So he told her everything, for he knew everything. How he knew it is not certain. Perhaps he deduced the story from the gossip of the villagers, the golden anklet which the jackals left aside, the royal robe the child was wrapped in. Perhaps he discovered it another way, a stranger way. . . . Whatever it was, he knew, and soon, so did she, all of it, from the time of Zorashad’s mastery to the coming of the Prince of Demons, from the extinction of the amulet to the dead nurse, the disfigured baby.
When the priest had finished, she sat silently for a little. Then she said:
“So I am the thirteenth daughter of a dead tyrant. What of his city Zojad?”
“Zojad is rebuilt on its own ruins.”
“Who then rules in the tyrant’s place?”
“A king, the son of one of the sixteen kings who rose against Zorashad.”
“This king’s son,” she said, “something tells me that the man who spoke to me today was such a one. Can it have been he who rules there?”
And the priest did not answer.
She was not as she had been, (how could she be?) though she took up once more the calm and useful life of the acolyte. She never spoke again of her pain, within or without. Her spontaneity was gone, and her joy. Her eyes now, looking at something beautiful, a leaf, a beast, a sky, were full of an empty and unrealized hunger. And also now, when the moon rose like a silver omen above the land, there was no longer worship or wonder in her face, and when the seasons added their veils of different color to the forests and the hills, she only said: “Now it is winter, now it is summer,” never anything else. One more thing had altered with her. She had taken to wearing a mask of cloth that hid all her face save the lovely brow and eyes, and gloves on her ruined yet agile hands.
Then the old priest died, and part of her died with him, the most essential part of her, her sense of purpose. He passed with peace from the world, she was left anguished in it. She wept upon his wooden breast and presently buried him and stood in the comfortless silence.
In the months which followed, few came to the cave for healing, only travelers from remote villages who had not yet learned of the priest’s death. On the very day of his burial, a woman had stood with a sick baby and cried for help on the slope. When the strange masked girl came out, with her red-hot hair and leaden tread, the woman ran back a little way and cried: “No, no, not you—where is the priest?”
“He is dead,” said the girl, and automatically she added, because she had inherited his medicines and the duty, if not the actuality, of his compassion: “Is it the child? I can help him—” And the woman, sensing everything about her, even through the mask and the low voice—all the ugliness and the bitter unlovingness—made a sign against evil, and fled. This was like a wound, a new wound made in the old, not became the girl felt herself hated, more because she had failed the priest.
One day, she was sixteen. It was the turn of autumn. Then winter came.
All through the winter, she lived in the cave, Zorashad’s daughter. Even the beasts did not come to her, they had forgotten the road. Only hurt and loneliness sat with her, and a sort of rage, inexplicable, deadly.
Each night she lay in the cradle of blackness, and soon a waking dream began to take her. She saw her father, Zorashad, clad in dark metal, riding through a vast city, the people falling on their faces before him in terror, while cressets of fire blazed from the roofs of palaces and temples. Presently the dream altered a little, slowly, and by degrees. At first she rode at her father’s side in a royal dress, holding a beautiful porcelain mask before her own smashed countenance—a mask so thrilling and lifelike that it seemed to everyone that it was really her face, and she was renowned for her loveliness. Then, when the cruelest nights of winter came. turning the reeds along the margin of the pool to spears of jade and vitreous, her dream grew also more cold, more cruel. Now she rode in Zorashad’s place, dressed in his iron, and masked in iron, a great diadem on her hair. She ruled Zojad, ruled all sixteen vassal cities, as he had ruled them; she was the king’s daughter, Zorayas, queen and empress, and captives tottered after her chariot in chains, among them the young king who had mocked her. Everyone who saw her now, looking at the masked face which showed only the fine eyes and clear brow and strong hair, whispered that it was beauty she kept hidden, not ugliness. Zorayas was so fair that should she unmask, her wonderful looks would blast them like a lightning bolt.
One night, tossing beneath this glorious and torturing fantasy, she sprang up and ran outside and cried aloud in a voice like the cracking ice. “What shall I do?” she asked herself, and lay on the ground, her ear pressed to it, as if listening for some answer.
An answer came. Indeed, it seemed to come from the earth, or Underearth perhaps. She saw before her a row of doorways, fast closed, some with keys waiting to be turned in their locks, others with the keys lying in a great pile among the shadows. They were those doors of dark magic of which the priest had bade her beware, which, until now, she had never thought to enter.
But Zorashad’s daughter put the image aside. She turned her head from it, she went back into the cave, colder than the cold night.
In the morning, a voice woke her, calling to her from outside the cave, calling for her help. It was the first voice she had ever heard which cried specifically to her in this way. Despite her reserve, her heart was lightened. Someone had learned of her presence here, that she had been the apprentice of the priest. Someone needed her kindness, entreated for it.
The need to be needed, to be necessary; a gift.
She went out, unsure, balanced on a thread, supposing that this might be the answer to her question.
A man stood among the frosty trees. He was a pedlar, his cart of goods close by. A swarthy man, with little bright eyes and a foxy smile. He bowed. more courtly than a prince.
“What ails you?” Zorashad’s daughter said to him.
“Ah, lady, a snake bit me, back there in the forest—my boot took most of its teeth—but I think some poison remains. I came on very weak, and my head spins. But I heard a tale of a priestess here, clever with healing.”
He seemed not to mind the cloth mask, nor to fear the cave, for he hobbled closer.
“I will help you,” she said.
“You are to be blessed, lady. May I come into the cave?”
She was surprised he did not fear it, but neither did he seem to fear her. Close to, he was bigger than she had thought, and had a powerful presence, a kind of male smell and aura. She had been used to the priest, impersonal, without aggression. This man was not like that. She took him inside, and he leaned heavily on her shoulder, and slumped down on the mattress by the fire.
She fetched the salves and clean water quickly, and bent near.
“Which foot?”
“This,” he said, and then he grabbed her.
It was too swift and took her wits. He slung her down, and when she wildly fought with him, he struck her and her head spun as he had told her his was doing.
“Kind, sweet girl,” he said, pulling loose his belt and tying her hands with it above her head in a trice, “a snake never bit me in the foot after all, it bit me here,” and he showed her his groin. “See the swelling? Does it not grieve your heart? Look how it sticks out, and only you can cure me.” She floundered and screamed, but he pushed her mask, all crumpled, off her face, into her mouth. “I do not mind them ugly,” he declared, “though with such a face, you must be lonel
y. Did a bear gnaw you? Another bear shall gnaw you now.” And he ripped open her garment and sank his teeth into the upper mound of her breast, so she screamed again, at which he struck her a second time, and all struggle left her.
She lay beneath him in a nightmarish, strengthless swimming of horror, agony and bewilderment. She could not find her voice, nor any strength to beat him off. He was heavy and determined, and well-practiced in this art.
He kneaded her flesh with his hands, which were never still, and scrabbled over her as if he meant to climb a mountain and must grasp for desperate holds. His mouth hung open and he gasped for air, but his eyes were in no doubt either of the ascent or of the summit. He slavered on her breasts and champed his teeth on them and forced his hot tool through the smallness of her maiden’s gate in three great spasms of wild effort. She could not even shriek, he made the only noises that attended their sudden haphazard union. Having broken into her citadel with a bronze-beaked ram, he thundered up and down in the bloody dark there, and howled as his lust burst from him, and bucked and kicked, bruising her afresh as his hands clenched on her, till the last drop was squeezed forth.
He left her, chuckling and well-satisfied at his deed. She lay a long while, until the yellow light of afternoon muddied the forest. Then she dragged herself about, cleansing the wounds he had given her, applying the salves. She did not weep. Later, she walked slowly to watch the jade reeds rattle by the frozen pool, the obsidian trees fade into a brackish sunset.
Something of her had survived the three icy fires, the cruel scourge, the desertion through death, the gouging rape. But what had survived was an iron stick, and frost-bitten harder than the frozen reeds and the cold trees. Though it had not been what she looked for, she had had her answer. Presently she returned to the cave.