by Janet Morris
To this Deilcrit would not agree, and after a protracted quarrel in whispers as to whose responsibility to whom entailed what, the door opened on its own.
A hunched figure stood there, backlit, a poker or thin staff in its hand.
“Laonan?” she called softly, as if blessed with night vision.
“Laore’s child. Do your ears hear?” Laonan replied in a singsong.
“I have cut them off and laid them upon the sand,” she shot back without a hesitation.
He whom Deilcrit had known as Laonan heaved a mighty, satisfied sigh. “Blessed be He, some things never change. It’s safe. We can go in.”
“How do you know, after twelve years?” hissed Deilcrit, setting his heels like a recalcitrant draft beast, ready to take up the argument once more.
“She told me: Identification: response. Query for shelter; acceptance thereof.”
He waited a time wherein Deilcrit only breathed and regarded him steadily.
“Come, now Deilcrit. Two and two are four, so they say. You’ve surely got me figured out by now. I’m surprised you think I’m this stupid.”
And with that he strode out into the square of light and stood talking with the woman on her thmshold.
The two went in, leaving the doorway wide, and soon he smelled a savory broth on the fire, and his stomach pleaded in low churning rumbles.
He ignored his hunger as long as he could. For a while it was overpowered by his fear of the unknown, a fear that seeped back whenever the commanding assurance that more and more frequently swept him was gone. He had been less than thirty days out of his swath of forest near the Spirit Gate. He fought homesickness like quicksand. Almost, he tore headlong through the woods for his bower. But the impossibility of taking up that life ever again hit him like a cold slap of seawater and left him once more hungry, disfranchised, alone.
With a growl and a mumbled prayer that Parpis’ ghost attend him, he walked into the but of the woman of Nothrace.
Actually, it was women, for there were three. They were all of the same family, three generations of a beauty that slipped almost unchanged from granddam to mother to child. But the child was no child in fleshly measuring, and he steeled himself, lest the lust that had thrice overtaken him catch him up and he dishonor himself and spill his pollution on this house that succored him.
The girl’s name was Heicrey. She had sunset hair and an aristocratic nose and thighs like a young memnis.
Her mother was Lohr-Ememna, and he truly believed the woman to be what her name declared: Vessel of Faith. She was enraptured, transfixed with hopeless hope fulfilled, there with Laonan beside her after an absence most had sworn meant death. The Spirit was in her and she hummed in a soft low voice as her mate told his tale to them, rocking back and forth at his, feet, her head against his knee.
The third woman, Amnidia, was aged as Dey-Ceilneeth’s towers, with a face that had been refolded by Mnemaat’s artistry into a Wisdom Mask the glory of which none possessed in the most orthodox of temples. From hollows deep as the night sky her bright eyes peered out, missing nothing. She rocked back and forth by the hearth on the room’s only padded stool, carding wool and subjecting Deilcrit to a straightforward scrutiny that made him sure to close his mouth as he ate, careful not to slurp.
The lithe Heicrey collected the meal’s remains, preparing to take the bowls outside to wash. He rose to go with her, offering himself. She smiled, and let her eyes flicker against his.
“You will not!” aspirated the old woman for the first time that evening, in a voice firm and querulous and clipped. “Sit down, Deilcrit, and talk to me. Quendros, walk your daughter to the well.” And the man whom Deilcrit had known as Laonan slid the bar back from the door and pulled it open. Then with a low bow and his daughter’s answering giggle, the two melted into the night.
“Lohr-Ememna, see if you can card wool in the dark,” commanded the hunched and ancient woman.
“Mother!” objected Quendros’ woman, but she took from her dam the raw wool and the started card and pulled the door shut behind her.
“Deilcrit, come closer.” He did, and sat upon the edge of the hearth with his back to the whispering coals, attentive.
Her skin was a chronicle of her days, and he found the settlings of her face majestic. In the dignity of her, he read wisdom. In the sharpness of her, he read knowledge. In the set of her words, he read revelation. And he did not like it.
“Deilcrit, lay hand upon my grandchild, and though you have saved Quendros, I will slit your throat with my own hands. I will ...” And he stared at that gnarled and clawed curl of fingers that shook before his face.
“Old woman—”
“That is right!” She grabbed him by the tunic and pulled him against her sharp knee. “I am an old woman, and I was a Wise Woman once. Do you know what that means, heathen?”
He stammered that he did not.
“It means that I know about you. And I know what kind of living death you have granted my daughter’s mate.” She let go of him. He crumpled into a heap at her feet, stunned.
“Woman, why do you say these things to me?”
“Because you will feed my Quendros to Wehrdom, and plant its awful stigma in poor Heicrey’s belly, if I let you.”
“No!”
“I was there when Imca-Sorr ordered the destruction of every child, woman, and man in Nothrace. I was on Mt. Imnetosh with two others. I was a Wise Woman. I tried with all my might to save what hope we could. Do you know what hope I mean?”
“No.’’
“Imca-Sorr saw dire threat in Nothrace. We supposed it a human nemesis. We tried to save that child whose birth had been foretold, that changer of destinies, unheedful of the warnings that, as seeking became reality, the omens began to provide. But you see, we were very wrong in our interpretation.” She rose, trembling visibly, and got wine from the sideboard.
She allowed him to pour it for her, and the normalcy of the action helped him ease the dizziness he felt. His mouth was very dry, and the wine slid down his aching throat like salvation. He took only a taste, remembering his previous faring with wine, but it warmed.
She, too, seemed bettered when she had drunk.
“Ah,” she whistled and laid the diminutive cup on the hearth, “things will right themselves. To each comes one chance to erase an error, repair a fault, pay a debt.” Her eyes seemed to wander, and her breathing quickened.
“Ipheri, explain to me how you were wrong, what interpretation I should see for these facts that yield no knowledge. Please.” He pressed her hand, hearing the chatter of Heicrey and her father’s maundering tones and the musical one of his mate.
“Please,” he begged as the door scraped slowly, cautiously open.
“What interpretation, wehr? Even on the doorstep of your death you jest with me? Do you not seek Othdaliee and the carnelian throne? I—”
“Mother, this is enough!” announced LohrEmernna, sticking head and shoulders through the doorway. “You are ... Mother?”
Deilcrit, black lights obscuring his vision, tried to stop the old woman’s body’s insensible fall. Then he tried to stop his own. Then he only listened from a great distance.
“Quendros, that vial there, quickly!” Sobs. “What possessed her?”
“Hush your tears, Lohr. She felt no pain. She chose her own time. Be as brave. Here, open his mouth, quickly. He is breathing. He is large and strong.” He felt his head lifted, something poured between his teeth, choking him with its dry powder. It was bitter. Water followed. He swallowed eagerly, glad to wash the salty sludge down.
When he could see again, the insect buzz in his ears resolved into a grieving Lohr-Ememna and Quendros’ low service over a shrouded corpse that took up most of the hut’s floor.
That was when it hit him: Quendros was not Laonan, but a Laonan; an infidel; devil-demon; a mage. But as the antidote took hold and he struggled erect in Heicrey’s solicitous arms, he reasoned that the man was no more threat then he had b
een before. The Laonan sect was so long ago swallowed in the mists of time that even faced with a household of them, he could not recall its tenets.
The body was buried, in its own faith, out beside the hut.
He enjoyed the digging; it was thoughtless, healing work, good for his arm. In that thoughtlessness he felt elation that the woman was dead and he lived. He felt no sorrow, no distress over what she had done and said. She was a demented crone who sought suicide. Nor would he let Quendros—he struggled over attaching this new and foreign name to his cellmate—slip from his service. He coveted Quendros’ usefulness too much to balk at the man’s religion. Then he heard himself, that cold and utterly capable self with whom he battled, and grated aloud: “Quendros, I need help.”
“I had thought you might,” rejoined that one in a hoarsened voice from the pearly mist across the grave, “but I had not figured the cost this high.”
Deilcrit did not immediately answer. He looked at the two women strewn like leaves upon the new-turned mound, weeping. “It is not fitting to grieve so for the dead,” he said very softly.
“I will tell them,” snapped Quendros, and threw down his pick. “You are at times a difficult man to like,” he added, and motioned Deilcrit toward the hut.
“I am not in any way admirable,” Deilcrit agreed.
“I would not say that,” demurred Quendros. “You are an admirable tactician, a good fighter, charmed beyond belief. I said you are difficult to like.”
“I am sorry.”
“You would be.”
“What of the women?”
“They have fended well enough for twelve years. Shall I now insult them with my pretense that their survival was only luck? Or are we expecting something, say, a wehr-rage?” He thrust his face toward Deilcrit’s. Mist swirled between them, lit by the hut’s door. “Are we?”
“No,” said Deilcrit with utter and complete certainty. And: “Why do you not kill me?” The miserable bleat sprang out of him, unsummoned.
“Over Amnidia? Only one who has never been espoused could ask such a question.” Quendros chuckled, shoving the door closed until only a crack admitted the night’s moist mist. He fussed with the fish-oil lamp, refilled it, then set to stirring the fire’s embers. “Deilcrit, what did you mean? Just what kind of help do you think you need?” And when that elicited no reply, he twisted around, hunkered down on the balls of his feet, saying, “I can help you fight Wehrdom: I know that battle well. But sometimes you look to me to be fighting for it. In that I will not, indeed cannot, aid you. If in truth you are fighting to extricate your soul from Wehrdom’s grasp ... ?” And he let the question hang unfinished, as if, having voiced the horror, he regretted it.
Deilcrit picked a hangnail until it bled, and the blood ran along the course of dirt that blackened his cuticle. He sucked at it, pondering a way to begin, regretful that he had spoken of his distress. But once started, it poured out of him like a flash flood. Somewhere in that telling the two women entered and set about boiling a brew of steeped leaves. He hardly noticed them. He told of his youth in the forest: when about the Children’s Trial, in his tenth year, he had been separated from the children’s band and first to approach the gates of Nehedra to claim his manhood. As he had come tearing down the path, heart and lungs pounding, a huge form had jumped upon him from the trees. Rolling on the ground; he had found a rock. When he rose and realized that he had smashed the skull of a grown man, he had been terrified. Looking ever and again over his shoulder, alert for the pounding of feet that would be the balance of the children’s band, he had rolled the body (for it was too weighty for his youngster’s strength to lift or even drag) toward the leaves. When with a final breathless grunt he pushed it once more, it fell into the leaves and disappeared with a crash of broken sticks into a pit that the piled leaves had obscured. He stared at the body in the pit, long uncomprehending, until a growl signified ptaiss about, and he raised his tear-streaked face to his death.
But the ptaiss was growling over a man-size corpse which it worried in the brush, and he staggered backward, away from it, toward the trail, his eyes fastened on Nehedra’s mud-brick wall, so close and yet so far ...
Then, when he had gained the road’s middle, the group of which he was member broke from the thickets, all wild-eyed and running pell-mell toward Nehedra and the maturity that lay beyond the tight-shut gates. It was the only Children’s Trial of which he had ever heard during which no children were struck dead by Mnemaat’s henchmen.
“So what?” demanded Quendros. “With the exclusion of Beneguan children, all know how Mnemaat’s culling takes place. There is nothing supernatural about it. So you killed a man who would have killed not only you but also the first three or four children to complete the course. Good luck and good riddance, is all.”
“But you do not see: I was this big!” He laid his hand on the air at about his waist’s height. “And the ptaiss killed the other man, while I struggled with the first. And meekly sat there gnawing while all of us ran by .... I have been saved from death six ... no, seven times by wehrs; and that exempts all of this insanity that has come to pass since the Spirit Gate opened.”
“What other evidence do you have of wehr-favor?”
Then he told all, and as he confessed his conjectures and his fears, his heart lightened. Somewhere in that exposition the women joined the exchange, first offering gourd cups asteam with a sweet infusion, then adding soundly thought postulations as to what Deilcrit’s brushes with Wehrdom and its inarguable predisposition to him might portend. What might in the end be gained concerned them. What risk he ran, what could become of him if Wehrdom’s soft touch in his mind became a strident command which he could not disobey, did not: they sighted his strength of character and his very nature as protection enough.
But Quendros did not add to this lighthearted comfort they offered. His former cellmate grew contemplative and somber. He picked his teeth with a charred splinter and scratched himself, and occasionally his mouth twitched in a grimace whose meaning Deilcrit could not read.
When his words grew bleary and the conversation dribbled to a halt, Quendros supposed that Deilcrit might have the just-departed Amnidia’s bed, a straw heap under a blanket near the hearth. They, Quendros and Lohr-Ememna, made exit through a low, curtained doorway that was set in the hearthside wall, beyond which lay a shallow dormered eave.
Heicrey fussed over the low, banked blaze, her curtate brown robe gathered close, her unbound hair a cascade about her hips.
He looked at the curtain still swaying slightly, behind which her father and mother lay, and softly denied the cup she held out to him almost shyly. Her eyes were deep and dark as new-turned earth, like ancient Amnidia’s.
He shifted uncomfortably and started to pull off the crude canvas boots given him in Dey-Ceilneeth. Astoundingly, she moved to aid him. Not knowing how to stop her, he allowed it, thinking of what the old woman had said to him in her dying breaths.
“Have I taken your bed?” he asked when he could stand the awkward silence no longer.
“No,” breathed she, who scraped with her finger at the mud which caked his boots. “I sleep there.” And she pointed to a second waist-high door, this one of ill-fitting planks, on the hearth’s far side.
“Then you had better do so,” he growled roughly.
With downcast eyes she turned and rose from her knee’s and banked the fire as suits for an easy rest, and rustled wraithlike past him in the gloom. There was a creak from the darkness as she pulled open her dormer’s low door, and then nothing.
He sighed and lay back, hands under his head, and closed his eyes. After much tossing and turning, he sat bolt upright and stripped off the rough sword belt which insisted on jabbing him, and the binding, ill-fitting tunic, then took the rolled blanket at the pallet’s head and spread it over himself.
He was at dream’s elusive gate when a swishing noise resounded in that echo chamber on sleep’s threshold.
He held very still, w
ishing the embers threw light. Then the blanket was lifted and her firm little breasts burned against his chest. He turned his head slightly and she froze immobile. So did he. After a dozen breaths she eased her length against him and glided one thigh over his own.
It occurred to him that she yet might leave if he pretended not to wake, but he could not suppress the smile that touched him. Unmoving, his hands under his head, lying on his back with her bent leg thrown over him, he awaited what would develop, his eyes wide to the darkness.
She was delicate, persuasive, her movements eloquent. After a time he drew his right hand from under him and wound it in her hair.
Later, he chased her back to her own straw, when the dawn birds whispered their sleepy tentative songs. He slept then deeply, dreamlessly, and awakened to scents of boiling grain and Quendros’ homely banter.
He rose and pulled on his garments amid jibes as to the lateness of the hour, all the while wondering how Quendros’ rawboned, lumbering mass could have spawned anything as delicate and supple as the girl-child Heicrey. Then, only, he remembered to be embarrassed by his near-nakedness before that one’s mother, and abashed at his cozening abuse of the pair’s hospitality.
But it lasted only a moment before the wellbeing he felt, and when Heicrey herself entered, rubbing sleep from her eyes, it was as if a ray of sun had struck him in the face.
Her discreetness shamed him, and he struggled to emulate it, but his eyes repossessed her and he resented with all his heart the knowledge of her that darkness had veiled from him.
It was not long after the meal that he contrived to speak with Quendros alone.
“Tell me about the Laonan faith,” he began awkwardly.
“Which facet?” Quendros teased. They were chopping kindling. Deilcrit attributed the other’s bared teeth and squinting eyes to the sun’s bright rays. In the daylight the hovel was poor, flaking, cracked, a three-humped overturned piece of pottery baking in the sun. Thunk! went Quendros’ huge bronze ax. Thunk! replied his own.