by Tanith Lee
Somewhere a contralto pipe began to play, melodious and wandering. He thought of Doriyos.
Behind Rem, Kesarh was panting, thrashing on the bed, damning the priest to Aarl, a spot neither, presumably, believed in.
Rem stepped aside to let the priest go by, out again into the impartial clearing, the ethereal surety of night.
3.
VAL NARDIA STOOD MOTIONLESS, surrounded by the dark, while before her the slender candle of the shrine fluttered in its vein of glass.
Aside from the candle, the shrine was empty.
It was for the novitiate to conjure there the relevant image of meditation or fantasy; if desired, the visitation of the goddess Herself.
Val Nardia had existed now on Ankabek twenty days. At first, she had been tensely strung, wishing to rush forward into the security of this religion so mysterious and so profound, and there be lost. Afraid also that the arms of the goddess would not hold her tightly enough, and she would slip away, her thoughts and her dreams coming on her like ravening tirr. But almost instantly tranquility had replaced her nervous seeking, and her doubts. Some luminous unseen air, indigenous to the great temple, enfolded her. With no effort, everything that was spiritual within her rose like unbidden music.
Even the persuasions of Zastis might be channeled, used in other ways, a flame that would burn in alternate vessels. She commenced to know the wonderful freedom of the human heart discovering, suddenly and in surprise, that through itself alone may be evolved communion with the Infinite.
Yet the knowledge and the state were primal to her. She had not had time to understand entirely that either condition, the world or the spirit, was valid; that the soul was capable of as mighty adventuring as the flesh, conceivably more.
She was not ready therefore, and poorly defended. A priestess had come, a Vis woman, yet with that ambiance of the temple. The priestess had given her the news.
And now, the only image Val Nardia could conjure beyond the candle-flame was that of her brother. Of Kesarh, drifting on the shores of death, less than half a mile from this room.
• • •
Most of the lamps about the clearing had been doused. The piece of midnight which moved did not resolve itself until it entered the dim seepage of light from the cell. A woman’s shape, slender, folded in a cloak.
Rem stood up, waiting.
There was no need of a guard. Not here. No assassin surely, even of the King, would dare pollute this sanctuary. Yet Kesarh had not trusted, required some guard. The trustless would seldom completely trust, of course. Rem had recalled once or twice the screaming, burning sea beyond Tjis, and dismissed the memory. Rem had done deeds enough himself to haunt himself, if he wished so to be haunted.
He thought the woman a priestess, and was prepared to offer her some courteous cautious challenge, when the oil lamp in the cell started a glint of red under her hood.
“My lady.”
The Princess Val Nardia looked at him, her eyes wide, as if to ask a question, then the question became apparently superfluous. She went by him, and into the cell.
Rem glanced after her, and saw Kesarh. The medicines had not greatly quieted him. Either real or exaggerated, the fever still pushed him in a slow dance from side to side of the pallet. Banked up by the rough pillows, his head was now tilted back. He looked ghastly, dead but reflexively animate. It must terrify her.
Rem was about to speak. But Kesarh’s voice came out of the slowly tossing corpse, and told him in three words to walk off. Then it told Val Nardia to draw the curtain over the door.
The footfalls of the soldier went away. There began to be a long soundlessness.
“Kesarh,” Val Nardia murmured.
“Come closer. Snake venom isn’t contagious.” She did not stir. “Did they tell you what I said they should tell you?”
“That you might die,” she said. “They told me that.”
The smudgy eyes glared at her out of the livid face.
“Did you believe them?”
She had not discarded her hood and it obscured her; her head was bowed.
“I woke before dawn. I thought it was a dream—some vast and deadly stillness surrounding me—Tonight, they told me you were here, and why.”
“You’d heard I was to fight Zakorian pirates in the straits.”
“I knew nothing of that. We’re out of the world, on Ankabek.”
“We? My glorious victory means nothing to you, then. Or my death at Suthamun’s order.”
“The King—” Her head was raised. The swift movement after all dislodged the cloth from her shining hair. She saw him stare at her, and fell silent.
“The King,” he said slowly, “guesses what I might become, in despite of him. He’s realized, maybe, I won’t be content with a strip of mud at Xai and ten soldiers at my back.” Kesarh let go the tension that had seemed to hold him. His body sank down into the pallet, his eyes shut. “But all that’s ceased to matter. If I die, I’ll trouble Suthamun no longer.”
Not seeing her, he heard the rustle of her cloak. Then the fragrance of her, either some perfume or her very skin, hair, soul, flowed into his brain. He did not raise his lids. For some reason on the black behind them he saw the empty space where the sword had stood in the chamber at Tjis, the sword which had reverted to a serpent—or been filched by some clever method through the bars of the window lattice, just before the snake was fed in there. Then Val Nardia’s fingers came down like weightless birds on his forehead. He sighed at their coolness, their gentleness.
“Don’t speak of dying,” she said. “Believe in your recovery, and you will recover. They would never have left you alone here if they thought you close to death.”
“Why not?” he muttered. “There’s my soldier to watch me. And they sent you.”
“I wasn’t sent. They only told me you’d asked for me.”
“And in compassion and pity you overcame your aversion, and forced yourself to my bedside.”
Her hand drifted from his face and he reached out and caught her hand in one of his. He opened his eyes and looked at her, into the radiant light of her beauty where all the illumination of the tiny room seemed concentrated. She was white, afraid for him and so, for now, no longer of him.
“Since we were children,” he said, “whom did we have to trust save each other?”
Her eyes faltered. They were bright with tears.
“Kesarh—”
“If you want me to live, I’ll live for you. Poison, disease, the wound of any battle—nothing. I’ll run through flood and fire and thunderbolt, unscathed. You can make me invulnerable.”
She wept then, briefly. She did not, even weeping, take her hand from his.
Later, the fever going out, he slept. In the sleep, once, he spoke to her, calling her, as in their childhood together, Ulis. It was the name of a rare scarlet summer flower, indigenous now only to the cultured gardens of Karmiss.
• • •
He returned once, and stopped ten paces from the curtained door. Having been dismissed, Rem’s purpose on the island was nullified. And there was no menace in the darkness under the foliage; nothing.
The sense of oppression emanated from the cell itself. Its source was presumably the Prince Kesarh Am Xai. Rem had no urge to meddle, and had gone away gladly, not even curious. He did not understand the feeling; it was hypothetical yet threatening, like unknown footsteps heard by the blind.
Having checked the clearing this second time, Rem once more moved off, on this occasion toward the low summit where the temple stood.
Ankabek was now immeasurably quiet. To one used to nights in Istris, or in some camp of men, the quiet was unfamiliar, partly disturbing. It seemed trembling always on the brink of an insidious whisper.
Near the temple, the trees fell back, and the inflamed eye of Zastis sheered through filaments of cloud.
The darkness reddened.
Rem halted, considering the temple, its great doors closed, walls windowless.
Why had he come up here, to look at this?
Yet strange, he would not be the first to think it: The pale people of the Lowlands who built their cities and temples of black stone, the dark Vis who built in crystal and stone whiter than salt.
Rem moved forward again. He had a peculiar urge to touch those immutable-looking doors, maybe crash his fists against them. They would not let him in. He was neither worshipper nor acolyte. Ashara, Ashkar, Anackire—his mother had reverenced other gods, Yasmais, chiefly.
When he was not far off, the big immutable, impenetrable doors swung inward. There was only the mildest noise. Some mechanism, then, must be automatically in operation under the threshold. Any might enter, who had the wit to approach. Of course, that was what they said of the goddess. Seek Her, you will find Her. Seek Her not, She is not.
A vague glimmer, hardly even to be called light, hung inside the temple. He could walk into it, or away.
Rem, once called Rarnammon, walked into the temple. When, after a few steps, the doors swung shut behind him, he hesitated, looking back. But they would open again when he returned. This was no trap. He went on.
The passage was lofty but unornamented, somber stone, that gave none of the magnification to his movements he had expected, no echo. The fount of the infinitesimal light seemed to be ahead of him. Gradually he discerned that what lay ahead was a blank and featureless wall. But he proceeded, and beheld that on either side of this wall the end of the passage branched into a new corridor. In each of these the light was a little more definite, and they curved away, out from the heart of the building. Randomly, he entered the left-hand corridor and followed the curve of it. The light was decidedly more vivid, but again there were no decorations, no painting or carving of any kind. The wealth of Shansar-conquered Karmiss had been diverted to create this place, and gifts had come from Dorthar, and tribute from Xarabiss, Alisaar and Lan. It could have been one of the richest wonders of the continent, a-drip with jewels, its temple guard stationed like statuary—but Ankabek had no guard. Only mysteries.
The curve turned out, then inward, circling. But the light unencouragingly dwindled. Then the wall ended ahead and Rem, passing beyond its angle, found himself, just as he had been some minutes before, beside blank stone at the juncture of three passages, his one of them, the largest leading off to a pair of tall shut doors. It was a replica of the entry in every respect.
Rem strode down toward the new exit, but here the doors did not respond. He retraced his way therefore, and took the new left-hand curving corridor. This, leading back, became the right-hand corridor of the entry, as he had suspected.
In the original passage, Rem cursed softly. There would be a secret kept at the center of all this, inside the black drum of stone that the passages endlessly led to and encircled. The means of getting to it, however, were well-concealed. There was no mark on the stone to indicate anything at all.
All at once, the windowless, pointless O filled him with doubts. The light which had, it seemed, no source, began to make him uneasy. He took another long stride back toward the first pair of doors—
And the pain shot through Rem’s skull like a lance.
He fell against the wall, shocked and powerless—it was too soon for this thing to happen again. Then the world went and the pictures came.
There was a mask, half of it cast from black marble and half from white. Then a second mask replacing the first, half gold, half silver. And then a third, half fire, half snow—
A man dashed from behind the mask. He was a Zakorian, howling and in agony. He had been poisoned by wine—no, not wine, by fruit, yellow fruit rolling under his feet, while behind him a bonfire flapped its skirt at the sky. The fire was that of burning ships, reflecting in black water. In the air also, where Zastis blazed. Then the flames sank. There were three women. One had hair like ice, and one hair like ebony, and one hair like blood. He saw into the womb of each of them, and in each case it was filled. The woman with ebony hair raised her fist and her face grew ugly. It was his mother, Lyki. She darted toward him with the rod gripped to strike and he flung up one arm to shield his head.
“No!” The voice that came out of him appalled him, it was not the voice of a child, but of an adult man.
He stared at the woman. Nor was she Lyki, but a stranger, Vis, dressed for the temple, and her hands relaxed at her sides. Behind her, two shadow-shapes: male priests.
This was almost amusing, to be caught twice. Next time, when? Next year? Tomorrow? Perhaps in a fight or battle, killed because the vision came and he could not control it. No, not the vision. The madness.
“Forgive me,” Rem said to the Vis priestess of Anackire. “I was trying to find the inner sanctum. I’m very tired. Dizziness—”
Her dark eyes looked back into his paler ones. He knew, as if she had told him so, that she did not believe what he said. That she knew, and the men behind her knew, he had been possessed. Lowland telepathy learnt by the Vis. . . . Had she peered inside his skull?
“You wished,” she said, “to find the Sanctuary of the goddess?”
“It’s well-hidden.”
“I will show you.”
Rem balked. He was nauseated, superstition crowding him, and the undertow of fear.
“No.”
“Come,” she said, and his eyes followed her though he did not.
She went to the blank wall between the three passages and knelt, and leaned to it as if to kiss. After a moment, the stone quivered and a portion of it fell slowly backward. A glow of light poured out. It was a mechanism like the doors, then, if not so amenable. Probably the marks on the wall were clear enough to those trained to recognize them.
He did not want to enter their temple anymore. It had become saturated by what had happened to him. Yet, in those instants, there seemed nowhere else to go.
Rem walked after the priestess, and the two priests, like guards, came after him. Perhaps, despite this show, he was trespassing and they meant to punish him. It occurred to him that he expected punishment in every avenue of life, expected and no longer resented punishment, and that this might be a fatal flaw.
The piece of wall which had fallen in had formed a tilted bridge on to a flight of ascending steps. At the top of these an opened arch let out the light.
The priestess glided ahead of him. In the arch she became a silhouette, stepped to one side and vanished from sight. Rem reached the arch.
The core of the stone, as the windings had suggested, was round. There were no colonnades, and still no carvings. All about the perimeter of the floor jets of fire spurted from openings, volcanic in appearance and certainly unnatural. They lit the high vault of the great black chamber, and sent waves of brilliance across and across the floor itself, which was one whole extraordinary mosaic. Gems flashed there and skeins of color. Myriad legends seemed depicted, legends or dreams—figures of men and beasts, winged things, chariots and ships and hurtling golden stars—his eyes abandoned it giddily. And there was something else to gaze on.
Across the wide room, four black pillars stood up against a curtain of gold. Closing off the crescent of the chamber’s end, the curtain was perhaps sixty feet in length, in height much more. Its folds hung thickly, and as the light burst on the faces of these, the curtain seemed made of laval rain. Scales of pure metal composed it. Thousands of them. The gold curtain alone showed where the rich offerings of Vis might have gone.
One of the priests said to him, “In this manner, the Lowland temples were made.”
“And so finely dressed?” Rem blurted in marveling anger.
“Yes,” the woman answered, “centuries ago. So finely, and more finely.”
“And beyond the curtain,” Rem said. “What’s there?”
“She is there.”
<
br /> He shrugged to stop himself shivering. “Your goddess.”
“Anackire.”
The outer temple, the passages—they were a trick, a safeguard. Uninvited, none might enter here. Yet they had brought him here, because they sensed some supernatural element at work on him. He should resist, or he would lose himself. He winced at his thoughts. They were out of all proportion—Yet the sensation did not abate. He was turning to go when one of the men behind him, the other who had not spoken before, said quietly, “Cross the mosaic. When your feet touch the sky-borne dragons, the curtain will open.”
“More technology to astound the credulous.”
The man’s head was lifted in its hood. The eyes which looked into his were the color of the scaled curtain.
“Only logic,” the Lowlander said. “To approach so close to Her expresses a wish that you might see Her. And yet, to see Her at once, and always: How then are we to remember what She is, that an effort must be made to attain Her? Men grow too easy with familiar things.”
Rem turned again and observed the curtain. Its very wealth seemed to draw him, that and the thunder of flame across its fire.
He did not look for the dragons, but he must have trodden on them twenty paces or so from the curtain. Like a bright wing it soared away. Framed between the central pillars the statue rose, and stopped him like a blow.
She was only a small goddess, three times his own height, maybe a fraction more. The beauty of Her, the perfection of Her lines, led one to forget She had been fashioned. And yet She was bizarre, unhuman and terrible. That men and women, creatures of the world, could turn to this as to a mother—He smiled wryly, recalling the mother he himself had been given to.
Beneath the statue, a foible of the second continent he had been used to think, the bronze trough was filling with serpents as if with water. They came freely into or vacated the trough through holes that led away into their warrens under the floor. Their gold scales glittered like the huge scales on the looped curtain, and like the coiled tail of the goddess, for She too was a snake from the belly down. Her eight arms were upheld or outstretched in the traditional modes. He did not know their meanings, but some appeared benign, others cruel. Her eyes seemed to meet his own. Lowland eyes.