Bradley, Marion Zimmer - SSC 03

by Lythande (v2. 1)

  Never could I have been entangled in the magic of the Larithae, or in anyone else's magic, unless something within me claimed it as mine, Lythande thought. It was not a comfortable thought. Was I perhaps secretly longing for the womanhood I had renounced and for which the Laritha died?

  Was it a will to death that brought me here? .

  Rage and the pain in her head, flaring like the lightnings of the Blue Star, burst in revulsion. What folly is it that dragged me here, questioning all that I am and all that I have done? I am Lythande! Who dares challenge me, man or woman or goddess?

  One would think I had come here to die as a woman among my own kind! And what would these sworn priestesses, sworn to the sword and to magic, think then of a woman who had renounced her self—?

  But I did not renounce my self! Only my vulnerability to the hazards of being woman and bearing sword and magic. . . .

  Which they bear with such courage as they can, her mind reminded her, and again the dying eyes of the ravished Laritha, smiling as she pressed the sword into Lythande's fingers, haunted her. Well. So she died for walking abroad as a woman. That was her choice. This is mine, Lythande said to herself, and clutched the mage-robe about her, setting her hand on her two swords— the right-handed knife for the enemies of this world, the knife on the left for the evils and terrors of magic. And the larith sword, tucked uncomfortably between them. Still, I am Lythande!

  The shrine is forbidden to me, as the silk-woman of Jumathe were forbidden to me. And into that shrine I went, among the blind silk-weavers. But the Larithae are not so conveniently devoid of sight. If I walk among them as an Adept of the Blue Star, they will believe—as the overseer of the blind silk-women believed—that I am a man come among them to despoil or conquer. The very best that could befall is that I should be stripped and revealed a woman. And soon or late, the ripples stirred by that stone would reach my enemies, and Lythande be proclaimed abroad what no man may know.

  She was walking now between two stalls where articles of women's clothing were displayed in brilliant folds, colorfully woven skirts of the thick cotton of the Salt Deserts, long scarves and shawls, all the soft and colored things women doted on and for which they pawned their lives and their souls, pretty trash! Lythande curled her lip with scorn and contempt, then stood completely motionless.

  It is forbidden that any man may know me for a woman. For on that day when any man shall speak it aloud or hear that I am a woman, then is my Power forfeit to him and I may be slain like a beast. Yet within the walls of the Larith shrine, no man may come, so no man may see. The idea flamed in her mind with the brilliance of Keth-Ketha at zenith; she would penetrate the shrine of the Larithae disguised as a woman!

  It is truly a disguise, she thought with a curl of her lip. She had no idea how many years it had been since she had worn women's garb, and by now it would be pure pretense to put it on. It was no longer her self.

  Nor could she, a man, purchase such things openly. If an apparent man should vanish after purchasing women's garments, and a strange woman, suddenly appear at the shrine—well, one could not conveniently hope that all the Larithae would be so conveniently stupid, nor all who kept their gates and brought them gifts.

  She must, then, manage to steal the garments unseen. No very great trick, after all, for one whose teasing nickname in the outer courts of the Blue Star had been "Lythande, the Shadow." To appear and disappear unseen was her special gift. She had begun to move stealthily, a shadow against the darkness of the tents of the sellers, out of sight of Keth and Reth. Later that day, a skirt-seller would discover that only six skirts hung in their colorful bands where seven had hung before; a seller of fards and cosmetics discovered that three little pots of paint had vanished before his very eyes, and although he remembered a lanky stranger in a mage-robe lounging nearby, he would swear he had not taken his eyes for a minute from the stranger's hands; and a woolen shawl and a veil likewise found their way out of a tangled pile of castoffs and were never missed at all.

  Keth was declining again when a lean and angular woman, with an awkward bundle on her back, striding like a man, made her way up the hill toward the shrine. Her forehead appeared strangely scarred, and her eyebrows and cheeks were painted, her eyes deeply underlined with kohl. She stumbled against a woman leading pack animals, who cursed her as a despoiler of virgin goats. So they had that oath here, too. Lythande was ready to assure the woman, in that mellow and cynical voice, that her maiden beasts were perfectly safe, but it seemed not worth the trouble. Wearing the unfamiliar garments of a woman was penance enough. At least she could bear the larith opening, tied awkwardly about her waist as a woman not accustomed to the handling of a sword would do. And she knew she moved so clumsily in the skirts she had not had about her knees in a century, that at any moment she might be accused of being a man in disguise. Which would, she thought grimly, be the ultimate irony.

  / have worn a mask for more years than most of this crowd has been alive. Against her will, she remembered an old horror tale that a nurse, decades since dust and ashes, had told to frighten a girl whose name Lythande now honestly could not remember, of a mask worn so long that it had frozen to the face and become the face. I have become what I pretended. And that is all my reward or my punishment.

  There is no woman, now, under these skirts, and it would be just, she thought, if I were exposed as a man. Yet she had considered and refused a glamouring-spell that might make her more visibly a woman. She would go into the Larith shrine with such resources as were her own, without magic. Yet the Blue Star beneath the paint throbbed as if with unshed tears.

  Between a woman leading goats and a woman bearing a sick child, Lythande stepped between the pillars of the shrine of the Goddess as Larith, built at some time by the hands of women. She did not know or care when she had begun to believe that. But obscurely it comforted her that women could build such an edifice. Against her will, a curious question nagged at her, like the voice of the larith tied clumsily with a rope at her waist:

  /// had not forsaken or forsworn myself for the Blue Star, if I had joined my hands to the weak and despised hands of my sisters, would this temple have risen the sooner? She dismissed the thought with an effort that made her eyes throb, asking herself in scornful wrath, // the stone lions of Khoumari had kittened, would the Khoumari shepards guard their lambs more safely of nights?

  She stood on a great floor, mosaiced in black and white stone in a pentagram pattern. Above her rose a great blue dome, and before her stood the great figure of the Goddess as Larith, fashioned of stone and without any trace of gold. The girl had spoken truth, then. And at the far end, where a little band of priestesses stood, accepting the gifts of the pilgrims in that outer court, she fancied she could see the slender and boyish form of the girl among them. It was only fancy! No doubt they had whisked her away into their inner courts, there to await that mysterious transition into a Laritha, under the eyes of their stone Goddess. A pregnant warrior! Lythande heard herself make a small inner sound of contempt, but she was in their territory and she knew she dared not draw attention to herself. She must behave like a woman and be meek and silent here. Well, she was skilled at disguise; it was no more than a challenge to her.

  / would like to take the girl with me, rather than letting her go to these women-sorceresses and their flimsy magic! (Not so flimsy, after all; it had dragged her here!) 7 would teach her the arts of the sword and the laws of magic. I would be alone no longer. . . .

  Daydream. Fantasy. Yet it persisted. Outsiders might think her no more than a mercenary-magician who traveled with an apprentice, as many did; and even if any of them suspected her apprentice to be a maiden, they would think her only the more manly. And the girl would know her secret, but it would not matter, for Lythande would be teacher, master, lover. . . .

  The woman ahead of her, bearing a sick child, was standing now before the priestess of the Larith who accepted gifts for the shrine. The woman tried to hand her a golden bracelet, bu
t the priestess shook her head.

  "The Goddess accepts gifts only from her own, my sister. Larith the Compassionate bestows gifts upon the children of men, but does not accept them. You would have healing for your son? Go through yonder door into the outer court, and one of the healers there shall give you a brew for his fever; the Goddess is merciful."

  The woman murmured thanks and knelt for a blessing, and Lythande was looking into the eyes of the priestess.

  "I bring you—your own," said Lythande, and fumbled at the strings that bore the larith sword. For the first time, she looked at it clearly and found she was cradling it in her fingers as if reluctant to let it go. The priestess said, in her gentle voice, "How have you come by this?"

  "One of your own lay violated and dying; she spelled this sword to me that I should return it here."

  The priestess—she was old, Lythande thought; not as old as Lythande, but no magical immunity gave her the appearance of youth—said gently, "Then you have our thanks, my sister." Her eyes rested on the reluctance with which Lythande's fingers released the blade. Her voice was even more gentle.

  "You may remain here if you will, my sister. You may be trained in the ways of the sword and of magic, and will wander the world no more alone."

  Here? Within walls? Among women? Lythande felt her lip curling again with scorn, and yet her eyes ached. /f / had not forgotten how, I would think 1 were about to weep.

  "I thank you," she forced herself to say thickly, "but I cannot. I am pledged elsewhere."

  "Then I honor what oath keeps you, Sister," the priestess said, and Lythande knew she should turn from the shrine. Yet she made no move to go, and the priestess asked her softly, "What would you have from the Goddess in return for this great gift?"

  "It is *no gift," said Lythande bluntly. "I had no choice, or I would not have come; surely you must know that your larith swords do not await a freely given pilgrimage. I came at the larith's will, not my own. And you have no gifts I seek."

  "Gifts are not always asked," said the priestess, almost inaudibly, and laid her hands in blessing on Lythande's brow. "May you be healed of the pain you cannot speak, my sister."

  I am no sister of yours! But Lythande did not speak the words aloud; she pressed her lips tight against them, and saw blue lights glare against the priestess's fingers. Would the woman expose her, recognizing the Blue Star? But the woman only made a gesture of blessing, and Lythande turned away.

  At least it was over. Her venture into the Larith shrine was ended, and now she must get out safely. She held her breath as she recrossed the great mosaic floor with the pattern of stars. She passed beneath the doorway and out of the shrine. Now, standing again in the free light of Keth, trailed down the sky by the eye of Reth, she had come safe and free from this adventure of someone else's magic.

  And then a cynical voice cut through her sense of sudden peace.

  "By all the gods, Lythande! So the Shadow is at his old trick of thievery and silence? And you have forced yourself into this alien shrine? How much of their gold did you cozen from their shrine, O Lythande?"

  The voice of Beccolo! So even in women's garments, he had recognized her! But of course he would think it only the most clever and subtle of disguises.

  "There is no gold in the shrine of the Larithae," she said in her most mellow tones. "But if you doubt me, Beccolo, seek for yourself within that shrine; freely I grant you my share of any Larith gold."

  "Generous Lythande!" Beccolo taunted, while Lyt-hande stood silent, angry because in this alien guise, skirts about her body, Blue Star hidden behind paint, she knew herself at his mercy. She longed for the comfort of her knives at her waist, the familiar breeches and mage-robe. Even the larith sword would have been comforting at this moment.

  "And you make a pretty woman indeed," Beccolo taunted. "Perhaps the gold within the shrine is only the bodies of her priestesses; did you find, then, that gold?"

  She turned a little, her hands fumbling swiftly within her pack. The sword was in her hand. But she could tell by the feel that it was the wrong sword, the one that killed only the creatures of magic, the bane-wolf or werewolf, the ghoul and the ghost would fall before it; but against Beccolo she was helpless, and that sword of no avail. Her hands buried in her pack, she fumbled in the folds of the bundled-up mage-robe and the hard leather of her own breeches to find the hilt of the sword that was effective against an enemy as unpleasantly corporeal as Beccolo. The Blue Star between his brows mocked her with its flare; she swept one hand over her forehead and wiped the cosmetic from her own.

  "Ah, don't do that," Beccolo mocked. "Shame to spoil a pretty woman with your scrawny hawk-face. And here you are where perhaps I can make Lythande as much of a fool as you made me in yonder courts of the Temple of the Star! Suppose, now, I shouted to all men to come and see Lythande the Magician, Lythande the Shadow, here disguised as a woman, primed for some mischief in their shrine—what then, Lythande?"

  It is only his malice. He does not know the law Larith. Yet if he should carry out his threat, there were those in this town who would know—or believe—that Lythande, a man, an Adept of the Blue Star, had cheated her way into the shrine where no man might set his foot. There was no safety here for Lythande either as a man or a woman; and now she had her hand on the hilt of her right-hand blade but could not extricate it from the tangled belongings of her pack.

  It would serve her right, she thought, if for this womanish folly she was entrapped here in a duel with Beccolo cumbered with skirts and disarmed by her own precautions. She had hidden her swords too well, thinking she would have leisure and the cover of night to shed the disguise!

  "Yet before Lythande is Lythande again," Beccolo's hateful, mocking voice snarled, "perhaps I should try whether or not it is not more fitting to Lythande to put skirts about his knees . . . how good a woman do you make, then, O fellow Pilgrim?" His hand dragged Lythande to him; his free hand sought to ruffle the fair hair. Lythande wrenched away, snarling a gutter obscenity of Old Gandrin, and Beccolo, snatching back a blackened hand that smoked with fire, howled in anguish.

  / should have stood still and let him have his fun until I could get my sword in my hand. . . .

  Lightning flared from the Blue Star, and Lythande brought her own hand up in a warding-spell, furiously rummaging for her right-hand sword. The smell of magic crackled in the air, but Beccolo plunged at Lythande, yelling in fury.

  If he touches me, he will know I am a woman. And if the secret of any Adept is spoken aloud, then is his Power forfeit. He has only to say, Lythande, you are a woman, and he is revenged for all time for that foolishness in the outer court of the Blue Star.

  "Damn you, Lythande, no one makes a fool of Beccolo twice—"

  ."No," said Lythande, with calm contempt, "you do so admirably yourself." Desperately she wrenched at the trapped sword. He yelled again, and a spell sizzled in the air between them.

  "Thief! Hedgerow-sorcerer," Lythande shouted at him, delaying as the sword sawed at the leather holding it in the pack, "Defiler of virgin goats!"

  Only for a moment Beccolo paused; but she caught the flash of despair in his eyes. Somehow, in the careless profanity of Old Gandrin, had Beccolo delivered himself into her hands? Had the spirit of the larith prompted her to a curse Lythande had never used before and would never use again?

  What, after all, had she now to lose, without even a sword in her hand? "Beccolo," she repeated, slowly and deliberately, "you are a despoiler of virgin goats!"

  He stood motionless as the words echoed in the square around them. She could feel the voiding of Power from the Blue Star. Truly she had stumbled upon his Secret; he stood silent, unmoving, as she got the sword in her hand and ran him through with it.

  A crowd was gathering; Lythande picked up her skirts without dignity, the sword in her hand along with the fold of her skirt, and ran, disappearing around a market-stall and there enfolding herself in a magical sphere of silence. The shouts and yells of the crowd were cut
off in a thick, quenched, clogged silence, as the utter stillness of the Place Which Is Not enfolded her, a sphere of nothingness, like colorless, water or dazzling fire. Lythande drew a long breath and began to shuck her borrowed skirts. Now for the unbinding-spell that would return these things to the stalls of their owners, somewhat the worse of wear. As she spoke the spell, she began to chuckle at the picture of Beccolo engaged in the Secret on which he had gambled his life—for the secret spoken in careless abuse, hidden out in the open, was harmless; only when Lythande spoke it openly to his face did it acquire the magical Power of an Adept's Secret.

  But not even in secret may I be a woman. . . .

  Setting her lips tight, she waved her hand and dispelled the sorcerous sphere. Once again Lythande had appeared in a strange street from thin air, and that would do her reputation no harm either, nor the reputation of the Pilgrim Adepts.

  Glancing at the sky, she noticed that the time-annihilating magical sphere had cost her a day and more; Keth again stood at the zenith. She wondered what they had done with Beccolo's body. She did not care. A stream of pilgrims was winding its way upward still to the shrine of the Goddess as Larith, and Lythande stood watching for a moment, remembering the face of the young girl and the soft-spoken blessing of a priestess. Her hand felt empty without the larith sword.

  Then she turned her back on the shrine and strode toward the ferry.

  "Watch where you step, you swaggering defiler of virgin goats," a man snarled as the Adept passed in the swirling mage-robe.

  Lythande laughed. She said, "Not I," and stepped on board the ferry, turning her back on the shrine of women's magic.

  Introduction to Sea Wrack

  The antecedent of this story—though 1 did not know it until long after it had been written and printed in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction—is the old story of the Siren Song. I remember one story—probably by the late great Theodore Sturgeon—in which a mermaid appeared to men as a desirable woman, but to women as a man. This too is the siren-song story, where to every comer the siren—or the lorelei, or the harpy— appears to the wanderer, as she appeared to the homeless Ulysses, and, as in the old folksong,