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, but 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. If I had not forgotten how, I would think I 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 with her 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 Lythande 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 other 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 of 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.
I 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 other 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.
Sea Wrack
The crimson eye of Keth hovered near the horizon, with the smaller sun of Reth less than an hour behind. At this hour the fishing fleet should have been sailing into the harbor. But there was no sign of any fleet; only a single boat, far out, struggling against the tide.
Lythande had walked far that day along the shore, enjoying the solitude and singing old, soft sea-songs to the sounds of the surf. Tonight, surely, the Pilgrim-Adept thought, supper must be earned by singing to the lute, for in a simple place like this there would be none to need the services of a mercenary magician, no need for spells or magics, only simple folk, living simply to the rhythms of sea and tides.
Perhaps it was a holiday; all the boats lay drawn up along the shore. But there was no holiday feel in the single street: angry knots of men sat clumped together scowling and talking in low voices, while a little group of women were staring out to sea, watching the single boat struggling against the tide.
“Women! By the blinded eyes of Keth-Ketha, how are women to handle a boat?” one of the men snarled. “How are they to handle fishing nets? Curse that—”
“Keep your voice down,” admonished a second, “That-that thing might hear, and wake!”
Lythande looked out into the bay and saw what had not been apparent before; the approaching boat was crewed, not by men, but by four hearty half-grown girls in their teens. Their muscular arms were bare to the shoulder, skirts tucked up to the knee, their feet clumsy in sea-boots. They seemed to be handling the nets competently enough; and were evidently enormously strong, the kind of women who, if they had been milking a cow, could sling the beast over their shoulder and fetch it home out of a bog. But the men were watching with a jealous fury poorly concealed.
“Tomorrow I take my own boat out, and the lasses stay home and bake bread where they belong!”
“That’s what Leukas did, and you know what happened to him—his whole crew wrecked on the rocks, and—and something, some thing out there ate boat and all! All they ever found was his hat, and his fishing net chewed half-through! An’ seven sons for the village to feed till they’re big enough to go out to the fishing—that’s supposing we ever have any more fishing around here, and that whatever-it-is out there ever goes away again!”
Lythande raised a questioning eyebrow. Some menace, to the mercenary magician. Though Lythande bore two swords, girdled at the narrow waist of the mage-robe, the right-hand sword for the everyday menace of threatening humankind or natural beast, the left-hand sword to slay ghost or ghast or ghoul or any manner of supernatural menace, the Adept had no intention of here joining battle against some sea-monster. For that the village must await some hero or fighting man. Lythande was magician and minstrel, and though the sword was for hire where there was need, the Adept had no love for ordinary warfare, and less for fighting some menacing thing needing only brute strength and not craft.
There was but one inn in the village; Lythande made for it, ordered a pot of ale, and sat in the comer, not touching it—one of the vows fencing the power of an Adept of the Blue Star was that they might never be seen to eat or drink before men—but the price of a drink gave the mage a seat at the center of the action, where all the news of the village could be heard. They were still grousing about the fear that kept them out of the water. One man complained that already the ribs of his boat were cracking and drying and would need mending before he could put it back into the water.
“If there’s ever to be any fishing here again...”
“Ye could send the wife and daughters out in the boat like Lubert—”
“Better we all starve or eat porridge for all our lives!”
“If we ha’ no fish to trade for bread or porridge, what then?”
“Forgive my curiosity,” Lythande said in the mellow, neutral voice that marked a trained minstrel, “but if a sea-monster is threatening the shore, why should women be safe in a boat when men are not?”
It was the wife of the innkeeper who answered her. “If it was a sea monster, we could go out there, all of us, even with fish-spears, and kill it, like the plainsmen do with the tusk-beasts. It’s a mermaid, an’ she sits and sings and lures our menfolk to the rocks—look yonder at my goodman,” she said in a lowered voice, pointing to a man who sat apart before the fire, back turned to the company, clothing all unkempt, shirt half-buttoned, staring into the fire. His fingers fiddled nervously with the lacings of his clothing, snarling them into loops.
“He heard her,” she said in a tone of such horror that hearing, the little hairs rose and tingled on Lythande’s arms and the Blue Star between the magician’s brows began to crackle and send forth lightnings. “He heard her, and his men dragged him away from the rocks. And there he sits from that day to this—him that was the jolliest man in all this town, staring and weeping and I have to feed him like a little child, and never take my eyes off him for half a minute or he’ll walk out into the sea and drown, and there are times”—her voice sank in despair—“I’m minded to let him go, for he’ll never have his wits again—I even have to guide him out to the privy, for he’s forgotten even that!” And indeed, Lythande could see a moist spreading stain on the man’s trousers, while the woman hastened, embarrassed, to lead her husband outside.
Lythande had seen the man’s eyes; empty, lost, not seeing his wife, staring at something beyond the room.
Far from the sea, Lythande had heard tales of mermaids, of their enchantments and their songs. The minstrel in Lythande had half-desired to hear those songs, to walk on the rocks and listen to the singing that could, it was said, make the hearer forget all the troubles and joys of the world. But after seeing the man’s empty eyes, Lythande decided to forgo the ex
perience.
“And that is why some of the women have gone in the boats?”
“Not women,” said the innkeeper’s potboy, stopping with a tray of tankards to speak to the stranger, “girls too young for men. For they say that to women, it calls in the voice of their lover—Natzer’s wife went out last fall moon, swearing she’d bring in fish for her children at least, and no one ever saw her again; but a hank of her hair, all torn and bloody, came in on the tide.”
“I never heard that a mermaid was a flesh-eater,” Lythande observed.
“Nor I. But I think she sings, and lures ’im on the rocks, where the fishes eat them....”
“There is the old stratagem,” Lythande suggested. “Put cotton or wax plugs in your ears—”
“Say, stranger,” said a man belligerently, “you think we’re all fools out here? We tried that; but she sits on the rocks and she’s so beautiful... the men went mad, just seeing her, threw me overboard—you can’t blind-fold yourself, not on the sea with the rocks and all—there’s never been a blind fisherman and never will. I swam ashore, and they drove the boat on the rocks, and only the blinded eyes of Keth-Ketha know where they’ve gone, but no doubt somewhere in the Sea-God’s lockup.” Lythande turned to face the man, he saw the Blue Star shining out from under the mage-robe and demanded, “Are you a spell-speaker?”
“I am a Pilgrim-Adept of the Blue Star,” Lythande said gravely, “and while mankind awaits the Final Battle of Law and Chaos, I wander the world seeking what may come.”
“I heard of the Temple of the Blue Star,” said one woman fearfully. “Could you free us of this mermaid wi’ your magic?”
“I do not know. I have never seen a mermaid,” said Lythande, “and I have no great desire for the experience.”
Yet why not? Under the world of the Twin Suns, in a life lasting more than most people’s imaginations could believe, the Pilgrim-Adept had seen most things, and the mermaid was new. Lythande pondered how one would attack a creature whose only harm seemed to be that it gave forth with beautiful music—so beautiful that the hearer forgot home and family, loved ones, wife or child; and if the hearer escaped—Lythande shuddered. It was not a fate to be desired—sitting day after day staring into the fire, longing only to hear again that song.
The Complete Lythande Page 10