The Earth Goddess

by Richard Herley

  Such regions were not visited by touring novices. They kept to the heartlands, to villages where they were sure of a suitable welcome. Journeying between the villages could itself be hazardous enough. Even today, in the marshes and mountains and unclaimed forests, there were plenty of bandits. Some, perhaps, were the remnants of the aboriginal tribes of hunters; most were disaffected or dispossessed farmers and their descendants. The novices would learn to deal with other hazards too – wild animals, the vagaries of the weather, and all the other hardships of the road.

  There was a certain amount of freedom in the boys’ choice of travelling companion, and when Paoul and Enco expressed a wish to travel together this was not refused. Their mentor, traditionally chosen from another discipline, was named as Ilven Fend. A week before they were due to leave, when muddy torrents of meltwater were already roaring down the mountain and the ice on the lake had largely broken up, Ilven Fend decided on the final route. On a cloudy afternoon, with a cold east wind blowing sleet across the temple square, he called Paoul and Enco to his chambers.

  Opening cylinders and scrolls, spreading skin and reedpaper maps on the floor, he took up a hazelwood pointer and indicated the course of their journey. It was to be a thousand miles long, beginning with a river passage north from Hohe, through the home provinces and thence into the country of the Felsengehans. At the port of Coblenz they would leave the river and head generally west, moving towards the channel coast. From the important seaside settlement of Raighe they would turn south, exploring the farming villages of the Kluh and the Courfen Plain and eventually, by following the River Loire for part of its course, descend into the valley of the Rhône. After a brief stay in the fort at Chaer they would, by skirting the High Peaks and following the course of the River Doubs, make their way back through the homelands and so to the citadel.

  “We will visit only three vanseries and a single fort, the one at Chaer,” said Ilven Fend. “I want you to see as much of the country as possible and to spend your time among the simple people. Our route will not be easy, and we shall have to maintain a good speed if we’re to be back here for the equinox. But I think you’ll enjoy it.” He glanced at the earthenware kettle which, on its bed of heated rocks, had nearly come to the boil. “I’ve elderflower and spearmint, nettle, or thyme. Enco, will you make the tea?”

  Paoul sat quietly as Enco prepared the three beakers. He felt subdued. He was pleased, very pleased, that Ilven Fend was to be their mentor, but he was still in awe of his teachers and could not get used to the way they were beginning to regard and treat him almost as an equal. To be invited informally into the chambers of an ilven still had a flavour of novelty and privilege.

  And there was something else on Paoul’s mind. This morning he had accidentally heard, from another novice, that Lord Mond was soon to be married. The bride was to be a distant cousin from a subordinate clan. “Not Bohod Thosk’s daughter, then?” Paoul had asked, as casually as he could, for the news had affected him strangely. Quite often in the past eighteen months, ever since their first and only meeting, he had been unable, despite the most rigorous efforts, to stop remembering the Lady Yseld. He had long ago forgiven her for her conduct: such behaviour was implicit in the mysterious and unattainable symbol she had become. For Paoul she represented everything his vows were designed to help him renounce. She was the alternative to his calling. Whenever, among his friends, the subject of women arose, it was her face and form he put to the hypothetical example being discussed. But so soon as the talk became coarse, as occasionally it did, he protected her image from defilement, replacing it with a composite derived from a dozen girls he had seen in the township. The same was true of his dreams. Her rare appearances there were invariably fleeting and innocent. Sometimes, to his alarm, he suspected that he also dreamt of her in other ways or, perhaps, more frequently than he knew. It was as though, deliberately excluded from his waking mind, she was managing to surface elsewhere. Yet he was convinced that he had no real feeling for her – how could he, after such a brief and unsatisfactory meeting so long ago? Had he not been a trainee priest, had he been exposed in the normal way to any number of marriageable girls, he would surely have soon forgotten the Lady Yseld, just as, without question, she had forgotten him.

  Not that she concerned him anyway. Her only function was to serve as a symbol. Nonetheless, it had helped to know that she was betrothed to Lord Mond and thus truly out of bounds.

  Perhaps their betrothal had been called off long since. Or perhaps it had never existed, except in Paoul’s imagination. Perhaps she had already married someone else. That was more than likely. To be unwed and eighteen and the daughter of Bohod Thosk was an improbable combination. Yes: she was already married. Paoul knew next to nothing of court life. Its events only touched the vansery when ceremonial was required. He would not have heard of her wedding. It had undoubtedly taken place; and, even if it hadn’t, what possible difference could that make to him?

  Irrational as it was, the matter had been intruding on his thoughts all day. He had not been so disturbed since the ending of the Starrad affair, when another boy had told him that, shortly after Paoul’s interview with the Prime, one of the fishmongers in the township had disappeared. The fishmonger’s wife and two unmarried daughters had disappeared also, and when soldiers had come to dismantle his shop and empty his house of possessions, his neighbours had been told that he had been ejected from Hohe for evasion of the tithe.

  Nobody had known the name of Starrad’s conquest or which of the three fishmongers in the township was her father. There was no more than the flimsiest circumstantial evidence linking the two events. It was both profane and ridiculous to suggest that the Prime, using the army to distance himself from the affair, should have stooped to punish a guiltless girl and her family – for they had committed no recognized offence. Rumours even arose that the family had not merely been expelled, but executed. Execution was the normal punishment for evasion of the tithe, but always in public and before a large crowd. If the rumours were taken to their logical conclusion, it followed that the authorities had not dared to expose the fishmonger to an audience and so had secretly murdered him and his family.

  Naturally, no one believed this for an instant. The rumours were idle speculation, supposition, the kind of extravagant gossip that circulates in the wake of any scandal. There was no cogent reason for the girl to be silenced, even less for her family. But Paoul had still found the rumours distressing, because it had been he, and Enco and Buin, who had given testimony which could conceivably have been used to identify her. For a short time the rumours had even threatened to shake his faith in the Prime and weaken his resolve to work harder.

  Like all such affairs, though, this one had soon been forgotten, and Paoul had emerged from it virtually unchanged. He had kept his resolution. A fortnight ago, in the academic tests which qualified a novice for the tour and marked the end of his formal training, Paoul had surpassed the highest standard in all but two subjects, and in those he had been commended with honour by his examiners. Together with Enco, Buin, Relle, and most of his friends, Paoul had been pronounced fit to enter the Pathway of the Tracts. The next morning, therefore, attended by an ilven and a kar, the first stage of his tattooing had begun.

  The tattoo of a red priest was applied with needles of blue flint, fashioned by the phedes and heated to boiling in vessels of sanctified water. Elaborate ritual attended the preparation of the pigment, which was sent from Hohe to all vanseries where priests were trained. The pigment base, found only at one site on the slopes of Mount Atar, was a red earth yielding a deep crimson when mixed, in aqueous solution, with the fresh pulp of ripe barberries – fruits sacred to Gauhm and gathered for this purpose only on the day of the autumn equinox, from a consecrated grove below the citadel. To this was added an infusion of marjoram in water from the shrine falls and, to promote healing, a decoction of madder-root. The whole was reduced by heat to the consistency of blood, and stored in airtight jars till ne
eded.

  The symbology of the tattoo was extremely complicated. The pattern consisted of three thousand puncture-marks, forming a pentacle on the left instep and another on the back of the left hand, connected by three lines, or tracts, extending up the leg and flank and down the arm. The pentacle on the foot symbolized contact with the earth, source of the power which was channelled through the tracts to the hand. Of the three tracts, one, the major, was thicker than the paired minor tracts; the position of the major, whether to the right or left of the minors, varied according to a priest’s nomination. A major adjacent to the outer edge of the forearm denoted a phede or ilven; one adjacent to the inner edge denoted a forzan or kar.

  The apex of the pentacle represented spirit. Each of the four lower points, proceeding sunwise from the apex, represented one of the four quadrants – creation, manifestation, decay, dormancy – and hence one of the four nominations: ilven, kar, phede, forzan. The major tract ended at the point on the hand corresponding to the priest’s nomination.

  The pentacles of phedes and kars were upright, with the apex pointing towards the digits, while those of ilvens and forzans were inverted. Thus the three tracts began and ended in a different way in each of the four types of tattoo. The arrangements and connections of the tracts and pentacles formed a kind of language, intelligible to the initiated, which could be read as an account of the unifying and distinguishing characteristics of the four nominations. And there was a fifth nomination, that of the Prime. In his tattoo all three tracts were of the same thickness, the minors being reworked as a sign of the new Prime’s accession.

  A novice’s tattoo was applied in stages. First, before the tour, he entered the Pathway of the Tracts. On each day save the last, over a period of eleven days, he received fifteen times fifteen punctures; each set of fifteen had its own special prayer, song, or chant, forming a narrative, recited by the attending ilven, who also marked out the course for the kar to follow with his needles and pigment. On the last day there were only thirteen sets of fifteen. Then, six months later, on returning from the tour, the two pentacles – each of two hundred and fifty punctures – were made. Lastly, at the full initiation ceremony, the pentacles were connected to the tracts with a further fifty-five punctures.

  Paoul had almost finished the Pathway and heard the whole narrative: he had been tattooed as far as the upper arm. He was finding the process more uncomfortable than painful. A herbal styptic, a fragrant white powder sprinkled by the kar from a perforated box, stanched most of the residual bleeding. At night the most recent punctures pained him, but it was a pain of which he was intensely proud, and he was studying with fascination the regular, beautifully even progression of the three tracts towards his wrist, each evening comparing his tattoo with those of his friends.

  Sitting here now, sipping nettle tea and listening to Ilven Fend making plans for the tour, Paoul was pleasurably conscious of the ache which from time to time made him adjust the set of his upper sleeve. Only three sessions remained before his Pathway was complete. Each session was carrying him further away from the danger posed by his image of the Lady Yseld. He was glad. Soon he would be safe for ever. And he was glad that next week he would be leaving on the tour. His departure was coming just at the right time: travel would remove him from her in person as well as thought.

  Paoul finished his tea and, asking a question about the route, sat forward and gave Ilven Fend his undivided attention.

  7

  Arriving at Chaer Fort in the cool of evening, Ilven Fend made himself known to the sentry high in the gatehouse. A minute later Paoul heard first one bar and then another and another being pulled back: a small doorway, just wide enough to admit one man, opened in the heavily timbered expanse of the gates, and Ilven Fend, followed by Paoul and Enco, stepped through.

  They were met by a soldier wearing the braided wristband of a unit leader. “Good evening to you, father,” he said, with the same note of deference that Paoul had found everywhere so far on the tour – in all the villages and settlements, at the ports and ferry stations, in the tone of almost everyone they had encountered on the road. “And to the young men, of course. Welcome. I’m sorry the gates were locked. There’s been some trouble today.”

  “What sort of trouble?”

  “Brigands, father. Please come with me. I’ll take you to the commander.”

  The settlement at Chaer was the largest in the province, with extensive field systems in the fertile soil of the river valley. The road to the fort passed near the village, which was one of the more prosperous Paoul had seen, its people apparently healthy and its thatched houses and barns in generally good repair. The fort stood on level ground a quarter of a mile or so from the village, guarded by a high palisade and a deep double ditch lined with a fearsome array of spikes.

  Except for the citadel, and the Trundle at Valdoe – which he could remember at best only indistinctly – Paoul had never been inside a fort before; neither had Enco. This visit was intended to improve their knowledge of the day-to-day administration of the provinces, a process in which the forts played an indispensable part.

  Paoul had already seen at first hand something of the function of the forts. Their main purpose was to supervise the farming population, keeping order, enforcing the edicts and the judgments of the provincial commanders. They also controlled the labour-gangs of slaves who maintained the roads, bridges, ferries, and other communal works. Their third duty was to defend the empire’s interests from those who refused to recognize its authority – barbarians beyond the border, or bandits within.

  Paoul had seen little of this aspect of provincial administration, except, and the scene remained disgustingly vivid in his mind, at a village farther north where the mutilated remains of three robbers, caught stealing livestock, had been hung from a gibbet outside the gates. This sight, more perhaps than any of the harrowing scenes of poverty and neglect he had witnessed on the tour, had brought home to Paoul how vast and how puzzling was the discrepancy between the plenty of the countryside and the lot of its inhabitants, all its inhabitants: for it seemed to him that the bandits and robbers were themselves only people who at some stage in their history had been displaced or dispossessed. For reasons he was not sure about, Paoul had decided to keep these feelings private. At the gibbet Ilven Fend had declared that there could be no room for weakness when dealing with such criminals.

  The physical structure of the fort spoke of anything but weakness. The palisade, ramparts, and the buildings of the central stronghold were all constructed of dark timbers, more or less massive, and the roofs, unlike those of the village, were not of reed-thatch, but of overlapping planks, a precaution against fire-attack. From a slanting pole above the gateway of the commander’s quarters hung the familiar green and red pennon of the Gehans: a few days ago, Ilven Fend had led his two charges out of the country of the Abendgehans and back at last into the territory of the ruling clan. The few soldiers on the ramparts were clad in Gehan armour and helmets; those in the enclosure or visible at the windows of the barracks were, like the unit leader, wearing hot-weather tunics and leggings.

  A smell of new bread was coming from the long, low building Paoul took to be the cookhouse, and he wondered how much longer he would have to wait before eating. Since dawn, when they had left the village of Vinzy, he and his companions had covered thirty-five or forty miles. Ilven Fend had insisted on reaching Chaer by nightfall. Paoul was footsore, thirsty, and hungry: the food the head man had given them on leaving had not lasted long, and Ilven Fend had not allowed them to stop to catch or pick anything from the wild, as was their custom on the road.

  The unit leader showed the group into the official receiving room, a ground-floor chamber four yards square, furnished more to civilian than military standards. The window overlooked a little limewashed courtyard where, on the far wall, a trellis was laden with a profusion of honeysuckle foliage and blooms. Darkness was approaching: the unit leader fetched a taper to light the oil lamps, and made
as if to close the shutters.

  “Leave them open, please,” said Ilven Fend.

  “Gladly, father, but the insects —”

  “Yes, of course. Do as you must.”

  Commander Yahl came in. He was a spare, resilient-looking man of early middle age, with brown eyes, greying hair and beard, and a nose that looked as if it had been broken long ago. “Please be seated,” he said, once the introductions had been made. “Kuber, take these bags to the guests’ quarters and see that fresh water and bedding are made ready.” He turned back to Ilven Fend. “Was your journey uneventful?”

  “Should it have been otherwise?”

  “Perhaps. I am surprised but also thankful to see you all safely here. I sent smoke to Vinzy, warning you not to set out. Was the message not received?”

  “It merely warned us to be on our guard.”

  “Then, somewhere along the way, it was misread. You were lucky, father. Several travellers have been attacked by brigands on that stretch of road. Did you see anything unusual, anything at all?”

  “No, Commander. Nothing.”

  Yahl glanced at Paoul and Enco in turn. “Yesterday the brigands became more ambitious. They burned a village three miles upstream. This morning we finally managed to locate their camp, but the patrol was discovered. Two of my men were brought back dead, one has died since, and another is dying even now. One of my best.” The commander made a grimace in which Paoul detected great anguish and bitterness.

  “Would you like me to attend him?”

  “No, father. I cannot ask you that. You must be tired and in need of refreshment.”

  “Not so.” Ilven Fend stood up. “Take us to him.”

  The wounded man was in a small chamber in the barracks. The first thing Paoul noticed, even before entering, was a strong smell of excrement. That, or the smoky light of the rush-lamps, had attracted an assortment of insects: lacewings, beetles, flies, small moths, dashing themselves against the lamps and the freckled limewash of the low, uneven ceiling.