by Tanith Lee
I recollected gold-faced men lying on their swords in a crimson pavilion.
The sun was dividing, a blackness down its center. It would split in twain and fire the sea. Then I saw it was a black man against the sun, standing over me where I had sat. Qwef.
“Tell me if Hwenit is slain,” he said to me.
“Why should you imagine so?”
“I felt it,” he said. “Yesterday’s dusk. I felt she was near death.”
“There was magic between you after all, then.”
“Blood speaking to blood. Yes. I felt it. I could not sleep. In the night I went to look where the boats are kept through the winter. One boat was missing. I guessed then that they had come seeking you. I took my own boat. I rowed through the darkness. Is she dead?”
I got to my feet.
“Look in the tent and see.”
He turned and ran.
Presently, I went to look too. She had been lying sleepily, nursing the red cat. Now Qwef kneeled by her, his face buried in her neck, and she stroked his hair, murmuring. I heard the cinnamon triumph in her voice, ever so soft.
There was a white scar on her breast, like a sickle moon.
The fluttering heart beneath it had faltered, then drummed. She had come back easily from her sleep—the dark ocean, cheated of her, falling away as the waves had fallen from her body that night I lay with her.
The white bitch had healed Peyuan after the dragon’s blow.
I, sly as she, had healed Peyuan’s daughter.
The circle ended and began.
3
I went to the beach on the other side of the island. Zrenn’s stolen boat was aground on the sand, and gulls were swooping and picking about on the waves. Otherwise I was alone.
It was a fine pale day, without storm or much heat.
I had gone beyond sleep, and sat like a shipwreck there, trying to come to terms with my own self.
It was very hard.
Certainly, I was not as I had known myself. For all Hwenit’s teaching, I wondered what new wells lay untapped within me. What of those strangest of all strange things she had mentioned, the priest gifts: the summoning of fire, the control of elements, the power of flight?
Each thing, perhaps, was there to hand in me, would come at a need. Yet, as the priests had done, surely I must prepare myself, train myself to be a vessel for such talents.
My thoughts went around and around, availing me little. Mingled in them was the image of the white woman, and the dark man, my father. Here was my destiny. I might look no further. I had sworn an oath to him. Find her and kill her, the enchantress who had harmed both him and me. When I thought back to my dreams, to Kotta’s story, to Eshkorek, it was very natural to me to hate her. So my debate crystallized. The tangle of mysteries was simplified to that one aim: his vengeance, my vow.
I stood up, then, discarding the rest.
If I had Power, I would use that Power to achieve my goal. Let me use it, then.
I cast about. How? I had no idea. It was laughable. Here was a baby who could smash mountains, and did not know where they were to be found.
At that moment, I saw the Dark Man, Long-Eye, standing at the edge of the wood, looking at me. I called to him, and he ran up at once, like my dog.
“Lord? How may I serve you?”
I perceived he had made himself over voluntarily as my chattel, having lost his other two masters, and assuming my anticipation of a slave. About a yard off, he kneeled down, and obeised himself. I recalled he had named me a deity, and apparently believed me so. He showed no fear. It seemed that, at the commencement, his race had known gods and no other. Gods had bound and ill treated and slaughtered and played with them. Gods were a fact, as were the sun and the shaking of the earth. Just another terrible reality.
I was not sure if I had summoned him for aid or merely for human conversation, but I said, “To find a witch, what do your priests do?”
“We have no priest. The chief is priest. We do not worship.”
I had begun remembering the krarl, but I knew nothing of the complex inner rituals conducted by Seel and his like in their stinking dens. It was indicative of my mood that next I said, idly, to Long-Eye, “A bitch mothered me. I am her kin but I must find and destroy her; the flaw in the scheme being that I don’t know where she might be.”
“In himself, Lord Vazkor will know.”
“I do not,” I said, “though I will suppose she is no longer in this land or continent. I think I would know, now, if she were that near. I think I would be guided to know it.”
“There is a big land to the south,” Long-Eye said. “East, then south. Across the great ocean. Perhaps there.”
When he spoke, it was like a summons. I glanced beyond him, at the curve of the sea. Why not that way? For sure, I could not go back. All was trouble and enmity behind me. I had no hearth, no kindred, nor any service to bind me, and my road had been paved with dead women. I had run toward the shore, had I not, as if it were my beacon?
“Who told you of this southern land?”
“Old maps of the lords show it,” he said. “There was trading once.”
I narrowed my eyes against the glare of the sun, and inside my lids suddenly saw a ship, fat-sailed, black on silver light. Precognition or self-deception? No way to learn but to risk the throw. Hwenit would live because of me, I was that much of a magician, and Long-Eye thought me a god.
In my current situation, I was prey for risk, and for any symbol.
To leave the island for the blank wideness of the sea was symbol enough of what I had felt in myself.
Before the lovers roused in the tent, or the boats of the black krarl came from the mainland, Long-Eye and I had put out onto the ocean.
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