by Tanith Lee
She sensed no echo. No shadow of another Vis woman, walking with a fair-haired child, fell across Berinda’s confused fancy. She had never been told of Lomandra, who carried the child Raldnor from the malevolence of Koramvis, in her arms . . . Or, if she had been told, Berinda had forgotten.
The sun was high and she had gone quite a way, when something moved on the rock above her.
It was a white wolf, looking bigger than the sky, and three others of its kind were behind it.
Berinda screamed. But she had come too far to be heard.
Book Two
The Dawn Child
7.
AFTER THE RAINS, the young summer rose and walked on the hills.
In the shining evening the hunter strode out of the wood, his kill over his shoulder, and stopped to take in the sweep of the land, the valley tucked below into the slopes, and the village that was his home. There were five dwellings, no more, but each alive with people. The nearest town lay seven days’ ride away. The village had only two zeebas. Many had never seen that town.
The hunter was ignorant, but at peace. The warm shadows running on the hills, the bright ending of the day, enchanted him without words or knowledge. Besides, his household would eat well tonight, and there would be enough to share with the neighbors.
Something then, a wisp of brightness out of the sky and down on the hillside, caused him to turn and look.
The hunter drew his breath hard. His hand reached for the knife in his belt. He made no other move.
Three things were picking a way along the hill just below him, one was a shadow, two were lights. A pair of wolves, a black one, and a white, both spectacular in their coloring and their size. And between them, something else. It was a child, a maiden child, he could see as much from here, for the little breasts had blossomed on her. A child also of the Plains People, for she was whiter than the albino wolf, and the hair that sprayed behind her, so fine it fluttered out even at her steps, was pale yet golden as a sunrise.
The hunter stared. He had heard of such things, children of the wild whose kin were beasts. It was not so much wonder as ordinary fear that stayed him. The huge wolves might attack him, if they should scent the kill he carried. The child would then attack him too, sister to them, no longer to his kind.
The black wolf halted. Its head swung about, and he saw the jetty nostrils widen. At once the white wolf hesitated, turned, looked at him. The girl-child looked last of all.
As soon as she did so, the hunter’s fear increased—and diminished—both at once. It became rather another fear. Though naked, there was a diadem of flowers on her head. He squinted at these, because her gaze filled him with some peculiar sensation he seemed never to have felt before.
The dying light trembled. One further new feeling slid through his mind, easy as water over a stone. And his fear went out. Confronted by the great wolves, the fey, unhuman child, he stood unafraid. He watched them until they turned again and went across the hill, into the mantle of the dusk.
• • •
His wife was at her loom when he came in, but started up with a glad cry. He prepared the meat and she cooked it, and later took some in a covered dish to the nearby cot where the husband, laid up for a while, had not been able to fend for them.
Later still, under the lamp hanging from the beam, the hunter played a board game with his wife, using pieces of bone he himself had carved to intricate and beautiful shapes. His wife won, as she often did, and they laughed.
And even later still, as they lay on their bed in the warm darkness, he said, “I saw a wolf child on the hill.”
“I thought there was something,” said the hunter’s wife. “All evening, I thought so.”
“Why didn’t you ask?”
“You’d tell me in your own good time.”
So he told her.
They slept till sunrise, when the little red sheep they kept in the yard began to bleat, wanting the pasture.
The hunter’s wife rose and dressed. She kissed her husband.
“You sleep. I’ll see to Babbya.”
Smiling, he turned on his side, and smiling the girl sought the door, combing her black hair as she went. She loved her man well, though he was some twelve years older than she. But then she had cause. He was a fine man, and besides, her father.
Outside, the sun stood on a hill. The red sheep frolicked. Between the two, the wolf child waited on the slope, her face to the hunter’s door.
The hunter’s wife took in her breath, as the hunter had done. In her case, it was purely awe. The figure on the slope, perhaps ten years old, looked like one of the exquisite bone figures from the board game.
There was no sign of the wolves, only the wolf child, with flowers in her sunrise hair.
The hunter’s wife slipped back into the house. She put a bread cake and some fruit into a dish, wine from the village vine-stocks into another. She re-emerged, bowed, then carried the offerings out beyond the yard, beyond the village, but not far up the slope, and left them there. The child watched her. The hunter’s wife came down again, went through the gate in the stockade and into the yard, and kissed the red sheep on its nose. “You must stay here. Or her brothers may come and eat you.”
The child could not possibly hear what the woman said, but the child suddenly curved her mouth—a smile. She stepped down the slope to the dishes. She did not comport herself like a wolf child, and she seemed to know what a dish was for. Gracefully, she took a berry from one and put it in her mouth. Then she raised and took a sip of wine from the second dish. She left the dishes neatly, turned, and ran away like a ghost of the wind.
The hunter’s wife laughed with joy at the beauty of her movements.
When her husband woke again she said to him, “Not a wolf child. A banaz.” Which in the mythos of Lan was a rural deity.
“A Lowland banaz, then.”
“Why not? Since their king made them lords, they walk all Vis where they will, and their sprites would do likewise.”
About noon there was an outcry. The sons of the fourth and fifth houses had seen a wolf sitting on the slope looking at the village. Men ran on to the street made only by footfalls.
The hunter went out, too, and beheld it was the black wolf, its tongue lolling like a ribbon.
“Fetch your spears!”
“No, no. It’s the familiar of a banaz.”
“Rubbish. It’s a wolf and we must kill it before it comes for the livestock, or for us.”
One of the younger sons unwisely hurled a broken pot at the wolf. It missed. The wolf panted in the heat. Or laughed.
Just then the hunter’s wife went up the slope toward the wolf, carrying a dish of meat from yesterday’s kill. The men shouted, but the hunter said, “Wait. My daughter-wife is clever in these things.” Nevertheless he put his hand to his knife, as he had in the evening on the hill.
A few feet away, the woman bowed to the wolf and set down the dish. The wolf came to the dish and began to eat. The woman walked down the hill again.
When the black wolf had finished, it rolled on its back in the early dust and rose up a gray wolf, and ran away.
The village muttered.
• • •
For a month, almost until Zastis, this kind of thing went on. A wolf would be seen on the periphery of the village, or the wolf child herself. None of the village animals were harmed, or the young infants or girls. Offerings came to be made, not only by the hunter’s wife, and were either partaken of or spurned. Women working among the vines became accustomed to the wolves, as to a couple of large dogs. The men would leave them portions of a kill, and began to say such phrases as: “The white wolf didn’t come today. I missed the shape of him on the slope.”
They were more innocent and more knowing in the hills. They could accept such things.
To the child they put up a small alt
ar, and left there items which might please, flowers, honey, beads. These were not touched.
Then, one morning, the hunter’s wife opened her door and the wolf child was the other side of it. She did not speak, and maybe was unable to, having spent her formative years with wild beasts. Yet she smiled, and her smile was lovely. The girl stood back, and the wolf child came into the cot.
The hunter’s wife made no opposition, but she was unsure now of what to do. She watched the wolf child, who was a banaz, pause by the curtain of the sleeping-place, turn away, put one finger, so white it seemed luminous, on the rim of an iron cauldron.
“Let me learn from you,” said the wolf child.
The girl started. She was deeply shocked that the child had spoken to her. Then the shock lessened. She realized with a sweet delight the banaz had not spoken in words at all, but by impression only, in the way of the Lowland People, from inside her skull.
• • •
She stayed with them in the house only a few days and nights. She learned swiftly how to be human. It was as if she had always known, merely wished to be reminded.
She clothed herself in garments for the first time, clothes of a girl-child from the sixth house, whose daughters were still young enough to provide them. And she might always have been clothed. She observed the flow of the loom, the bubbling of pots, the gamboling of Babbya, all with equal intensity. She braided her hair and unbraided it. She washed herself in the stream, but, as the hunter’s wife had noted, true banaz that she was, the wolf child had always smelled clean, and of a strange natural perfume, like a flower.
She knew the Vis language, either that or she had no need to know it, taking information with tactful delicacy from their minds. Although no one but the hunter’s wife had direct communication with her, and that seldom.
By night, the wolves slept at the door.
The village left the altar standing.
The hunter’s wife began to love the child, even in these few days, love her as the daughter-sister the gods had not yet granted her. But the child in her village clothes, her hair like sunbeams, seemed older than a child. She seemed a woman.
And on the fifth day the hunter’s wife wept, and the wolf child stroked her hair, her hands a caress, her eyes that were like suns eclipsed by a remote gentleness.
“You must get the loan of a zeeba,” said the hunter’s wife to her husband. “You must go south.”
He frowned, at his wife’s sorrow, the child’s silence.
“Why?”
“She’s told me, in the way she tells me things. She wants you to take her to the town. And—to sell her there, as a slave.”
“There are laws,” he said, “against the sale of Lowlanders.”
“She gathered herbs on the hills today, to stain her skin and hair.”
The hunter stared, as at the first. And afterwards he stared almost in a renewal of fear as he saw the child standing under the lamp, her hair brown as wood, and her skin swarthy, which before had not even tanned.
• • •
The wolves dashed, black and white, over the brim of the blue hills, and ran with the cart and zeeba for several miles.
The child regarded them, but did not make a sound. That she spoke to the wolves within her head was likely.
When the wolves dropped back and did not reappear, the hunter said: “You’ll have taken away the luck of my village.”
But he knew that was unfair and untrue, and after-seasons proved as much.
• • •
The town of Olm lay in that nebulous region of borderland where Lan married with Elyr. Mountains towered over the town, the backbone of the landscape. Somewhere up amid their spines was to be found the ancient kingdom of the Zor, leaderless now, save that it gave its fealty to the king at Amlan. The Zor had, centuries ago, held to itself a religion currently commonplace: The worship of a woman god, to whom the serpent was sacred.
The carts that came jumbling into the marketplace of Olm had all manner of goods to sell. Even slaves were sometimes sold there, Though Lanelyr, like her parent lands either side, dealt sparingly if at all in slavery. Indeed, to some extent it was the blond man of Shansar and Vardath who had revitalized a flagging trade. In the second continent there were now countless Vis slaves at work for fair-skinned masters. And in the marketplace at Olm, a small group of blond Vardians, merchants of flesh of all kinds, stood with wine, watching a woman on a dais. She was a snake dancer from the Zor, a contortionist limber as the giant snake through whose silver coils she wheeled her brazen body.
Such sights, inserted between the drapes of her litter, brought only exasperation to Safca, the daughter of Olm’s Lannic guardian. But then, the world exasperated her; the world, her youth, and her lack of opportunity. She still fantasized occasionally that some lord, riding through Lanelyr, would see and be seduced by her, sweeping her away to worthier things. But she knew herself too homely to have such an effect.
“Go on,” she said to her bearers impatiently.
Her outrider leaned to the litter, and explained the obvious: The Vardians were in their path and might well refuse to move until the dancer was finished. Such a scene would look poorly.
“If I must wait here, then,” said Safca, “I’ll visit the stalls.”
She got out of the litter, enamel beads in her hair, her spirit crumpled, and started to walk across the market. The outrider dismounted, and walked now at her back, hand ceremonially to sword-hilt.
She was recognized on most sides, and offered politenesses, of course. Only the Vardians quite ignored her.
Perversely, Safca Am Olm idled to inspect the cages of multicolored birds directly beside them. Through bars and feathers, she covertly watched, disliking the invaders’ paleness and their language, wondering through all her antipathy if one might turn and find her interesting merely because she was a contrast.
But they did not turn.
The dancer on the dais fulfilled her ritual—once, such dancing had been nothing less—and went away, roped by the snake. Presently, it became apparent the rostrum was to be used for a slave auction.
The guardian’s daughter stood in the burning sunlight, pretending now she watched the stage.
The Vardians drew her. One in particular. She considered if it would be possible to enjoy a foreigner. Zastis was not so far off. Could this man be enticed as a lover? They said the men of the Other World were immune to Zastis, but how could that be?
The first owners showed off their wares. As they were bid for and sold, the Vardians did nothing at all. Next came a chain of slaves from the backlands, handled by the public auctioneer. They were unexceptional, three men and a couple of slovens, no doubt brought to this by debts.
One of the Vardians, the one Safca had become fascinated by, pointed out the sloven at the end of the line.
But no, it was not the sloven. Another stood just beyond her, a child, eleven or twelve, a girl with a wave of hair, too light to be all Vis, too dark to be legally one of the yellow people.
“Twenty copper parings,” the Vardian called out, “for the child.”
“Twenty, master? That’s not—”
“Vardish copper. Not the impure muck of Lan.”
Safca lost her temper with this man who spoke with an accent, reviled her country, and would not look at her.
“Ten parings of silver,” she cried, much clearer than a bell. “Good silver from the guardian’s store. Nothing imported.”
Here and there, some of the Lannic crowd laughed.
The Vardian turned at last. His look was frank, unenthralled and touched by menace. She held it, alarmed, sweat starting on her forehead. Involuntarily her fingers closed over the lucky bracelet she wore on her left wrist and never took off. Slowly, he turned back. “Fifteen parings of Vardish silver, by Raldnor.”
She lost her head. “By Raldnor!” s
he shouted, “and by Yannul the Lan, one of his captains—” there was more crowd noise “—twenty silver parings.”
The Vardian turned again. She withered in his gaze. Without another accented word, leaving their wine, he and his companions walked off across the market.
She felt silly, degraded almost. She should have left well alone.
Lan, neutral throughout the Lowland War, had given many of her sons to fight for the hero Raldnor against Dortharian oppression, not least Yannul, the wandering acrobat, who learned the trade of soldiering beside Raldnor in Xarabiss, then used the knowledge fighting side by side with him and with his army, across the length of Vis. It had been Yannul, too, who made the perilous voyage with Raldnor that ended at the forest-shores of the Sister Continent. Some said Yannul had remained in Dorthar, at Anackyra, with the Vathcrian King who was Raldnor’s son. Others said Yannul was in Lan. A pity he was not here. It seemed the yellow men who swaggered across Lan, her commercial conquerors if not otherwise, needed some token of the past to stay their arrogance.
But it seemed, too, Safca had bought a slave.
The child walked by her litter back to the guardian’s stone house with its single tower. A bill for the money had been left with the auctioneer, who in turn Safca saw paying another. This fellow had long hair down to his shoulderblades, a mark of the hills, for in the towns and cities now men wore their hair only the length of the neck—a fashion of Vathcri and Vardath. Probably, the hillman was the child’s father.
Unnerved, Safca had barely glanced at her purchase. In the courtyard, she sent the child to be properly bathed and fed and clad. It was to be presented to her in her chamber before the evening meal.
But the shadows were still short beside the brass fountain when two of Safca’s girls ran out to her in uproar. It seemed the swarthy child, dipped in the tub, had come out like a star.