The Earth Goddess

by Richard Herley

  Today he was wearing his official tunic, with a stiff, high collar which, each time he moved, rasped against the freshly shaved skin of his chin and throat. The collar was fastened with a copper pin; on his breast was a minute copper brooch, the emblem of the phedes, a serpent devouring its own tail. “The boys are better behaved,” he went on. “The older ones, in particular, are less unruly. They look up to you and have become keen to learn.” He held up his hand. “No, Forzan Paoul, do not protest. I speak no more than the truth. You have shown yourself an asset to the vansery, and I am most reluctant to deprive the school of your services. A week ago, however, I received a request from the Protector. In subsequent discussions with him and with the vansery board, your name emerged. You are ideally qualified by age as well as temperament for the delicate and difficult task that General Teshe and I want you to undertake. So uncongenial is this work that we think it only fair to offer you the chance to decline it outright as well as at the end of a probationary period.” Phede Keldis gave what Paoul could only interpret as an awkward smile. “Have you been introduced to Lord Hothen?”

  “No, Phede Keldis.”

  “I thought not. Have you seen him?”

  “No, Phede Keldis. At least …” Paoul began, remembering once again the pathetic, deficient child he had seen all those years ago from the rail of the Veisdrach. “At least, not since we were small boys, and then I only saw him once and at a distance.”

  “What stories have you heard about him?”

  “I know that he comes of age next autumn, and that some doubt attaches to his chances of being allowed to accede.”

  The Vansard grunted. “Have you heard about the latest incident?”

  “Very little news reaches us in the village, Phede Keldis, especially where the inner enclosure is concerned.”

  Choosing his words with care, Phede Keldis proceeded to explain what he wanted of Paoul. Ten days ago, Lord Hothen had beaten one of his servants so badly that he would never be able to work again. It was partly an accident: the man had fallen down some stairs. In the normal way, of course, this incident would not have caused concern, but it was only the latest, and the worst, in a long series of outbursts. Lord Hothen was developing badly.

  Becoming even more circumspect, Phede Keldis implied that a large measure of the blame belonged to Lord Hothen’s mother, the Lady Ika. She had continuously undermined General Teshe’s efforts to provide him with a suitable education. She had so spoiled her son, so indulged his whims, that now General Teshe could scarcely exert effective control. But it was not as straightforward as that. Sometimes Lord Hothen could be remarkably cunning. He had manipulated his mother just as much as she had encouraged him. He was playing her off against General Teshe, perhaps in a misguided and futile attempt to have General Teshe sent back to Hohe.

  It was still the desire of Lord Heite that Lord Hothen should, eight months from now, be declared Brennis Gehan Sixth. Unless there was a profound change in Lord Hothen’s behaviour, though, Lord Heite would be disappointed and – just at a time when the domain was achieving peace and prosperity – some degree of political upheaval would be sure to result. This would reflect most unjustly on General Teshe, who was an able administrator and had borne his responsibility towards Lord Hothen with prodigious patience and restraint. In desperation, then, General Teshe had sought the Vansard’s help. The idea of a new tutor for Lord Hothen, a companion, a calming influence, someone his own age who would not be seen as a threat, had come from the general himself. Paoul was the youngest priest in the vansery, only two months older than Lord Hothen, with whom he had had no contact; and his flair for teaching suited him perfectly for the job. In addition, he had been warmly recommended by Kar Houle.

  The post would last only until Lord Hothen came of age. It would necessitate taking quarters in the residence, so that Paoul would be on call at all times, though one day a week would be left free for his private use. After one month – assuming, of course, that Lord Hothen had not already taken a dislike to him, or that the arrangement had not failed in some other way – Paoul would have the right to resign if he wished, without any recriminations whatever.

  “Indeed,” Phede Keldis continued, “you can turn it down here and now. I would not blame you if you did. It is likely to be thankless work. You only have to say.”

  “No, Phede Keldis,” Paoul said, astonished that he should have been chosen, and already wondering what it would be like and how he would manage to deal with the delinquent Lord Hothen. He was also thinking how relieved he would be to get away from Valdoe Village, from the school, and from his lodgings at the settlement farm. “I am truly flattered. If you feel I can be of service, I will do my best.”

  “Splendid!” The Vansard put his hands together. “That is just the way Kar Houle said you’d react.” He stood up. “I believe General Teshe is in his chambers at this very moment. Let us go there at once and introduce you to him. Then, this afternoon, we can go and meet your charge.”

  2

  Rian had no idea why, but she felt a great and immediate affinity for this gentle, quietly spoken young priest. He was almost absurdly good-looking, she thought, and, it seemed, completely unaware of the fact. Even at her age she still felt a weakness when regarded by such a pair of dark eyes, and his beautiful manners, his impeccable politeness, noteworthy even by the standards of the priesthood, had won her approval from the first moment he had stepped through the threshold this afternoon. The contrast between him and Hothen could hardly be more pronounced; but – and Rian could not rid herself of the sensation that something mysterious was at work in her imagination – it also seemed that Forzan Paoul and Lord Hothen shared an uncanny, shadowy, physical resemblance.

  “I’m relying on you to guide me through the first few days, Mistress Rian. I don’t want to upset any customs of the household. You must tell me what is expected.”

  “You should not call me ‘Mistress’, Forzan Paoul,” she said, unable to bring herself to address him as “father”: he was simply too young, barely older than Hothen himself, and not the least bit like any of the other priests she had met. “I am a slave.”

  “But are you not the Lady Ika’s companion?”

  “I was once her body-slave, and my lord Hothen’s nurse, but I have no title now. I just belong to the household.”

  “I see,” he said, somewhat brusquely, for the sake of a servant who was passing them on the corridor, but from the earnest way he looked up at her again she saw that he wanted her help still. She saw that he made no real distinction between a slave and a free woman, a servant with the right to the courtesy title “Mistress”, and Rian felt herself becoming more drawn to him than ever. She could not remember when she had last been accorded the dignity of being treated not as an object, but as a human being, not since the days of the Lady Altheme.

  It was early evening, an hour after dark, and his baggage had just arrived from Valdoe Village. He was unpacking, laying out his clothes and his few possessions in the room he had been given, a small chamber on the north side of the gallery, between the guest quarters and one of the pantries. The room, allotted to him earlier by the chamberlain, had been used as a temporary store for some of Ika’s unwanted things. Rian had been in the process of removing them when Forzan Paoul had arrived. She had offered to unpack for him, but, declining, he had engaged her in conversation instead. Now she was standing in the doorway, in her arms a bundle of embroidered robes.

  “Would Forzan Paoul like some flowers?”

  The room seemed very bare and cold; his possessions, thinly spread on the shelves and on top of the cupboard, made it appear bleaker yet.

  “Surely, at this time of year …”

  “Dried flowers, I mean, and teasels and grasses.”

  “You are very kind, Rian, but please do not trouble yourself.” He pushed his leather bag out of sight, under the bed. “What I would like, though, is to know what sort of dress is worn at the night meal.”

  “Formal, Fo
rzan Paoul. General Teshe makes it a rule.”

  “Will he be there?”

  “This evening I believe the general is entertaining guests in his own suite downstairs.”

  “And you, Rian, will you be there?”

  “Yes, Forzan Paoul. I am always with my lady Ika when she needs me.” Rian suddenly remembered the weight of all the robes in her arms. “I think I ought to go to her now.”

  “Of course,” he said, reverting to a less friendly tone, for another servant had just emerged from the kitchen door farther along the gallery, releasing the odours of food reaching the final stages of cooking.

  The night meal was always served in Hothen’s quarters, in the Flint Lord’s Chamber. At one time it had often been attended by General Teshe, but no longer. Nowadays he ate there as seldom as his long and ingenious list of excuses allowed. This did not worry Rian: she feared and disliked General Teshe, and without his presence there was a better chance of surviving the meal without a tantrum. As it was, there were quite enough hidden difficulties to consider, quite enough uncertain and constantly changing likes and dislikes to remember and keep in check.

  Rian wondered how Forzan Paoul would fare. She had lost count of Hothen’s tutors. Most had lasted only a few months, some only a few weeks, and one, whom Hothen had deliberately wounded at archery practice, had lasted only four days. All the other tutors had lived in the vansery. Forzan Paoul was the first to be given quarters here. Perhaps he was more than an ordinary tutor; after all, Hothen was getting beyond the age when there could be hope of his responding to conventional teaching.

  Watching Forzan Paoul as he took his place by the dais, however, Rian began to fear for his chances. He looked too innocent, too inexperienced, despite his red tattoo and his spotless tunic of priestly grey. In the suffuse light of the pole-lamps, the resemblance between him and Hothen seemed yet more marked. It even extended somehow to Ika, who, this evening, an avid listener to her slaves’ gossip about the new young priest, had made a ludicrous effort to present herself at her best. At forty-three, with the tops of her arms beginning to sag, with a lifetime’s inactivity recorded in the laxity of her flesh and on the coarsening grain of her skin, she should not have put on that robe; nor should she have worn those earrings or told her body-slave to apply quite so much powder to the wrinkles round her blank, deformed and sunken eyes. In fact, Rian realized with a start, Ika had made herself grotesque. Until tonight Rian had not noticed how stealthily and persistently the years had been destroying Ika’s youth. It had all gone: Ika was middle-aged.

  “Are we to be kept waiting yet again?” she said, as the three servants, having spread out the cloths and distributed the spoons and bowls in readiness for the meal, went out once more to the kitchen.

  Ika was sitting in her usual place, near the door from her chambers – from the suite reserved for the Flint Lord’s lady, the rooms that Ika had no right to occupy – and Rian, as always, was sitting beside her. Hothen, the nominal head of the household, was sitting with his food-taster at the dominant place, his back to the east window. Forzan Paoul was on his right. The place opposite Forzan Paoul was still vacant.

  “I cannot imagine what Forzan Paoul must think of us,” Ika said.

  “It is early yet, my lady,” Rian said, hoping that Hothen’s interest had not been aroused: he was sitting in his slumped, disagreeable way, making a minute and prolonged examination of the intricate carving on the handle of his spoon. Forzan Paoul was watching him calmly, as if deciding on a course of action. Hothen had all but ignored his new tutor. “And there was no water for her bath,” Rian added.

  Ika pretended not to have heard. “I believe, Forzan Paoul, that there is still one of us whose acquaintance the kindly general spared you this afternoon. She was indisposed, was she not, Hothen?”

  At this moment the door from the gallery opened and, to her relief, Rian saw that Yseld had finally arrived. She looked harassed and upset; the skirts of her stone-coloured robe were crumpled and a few tendrils of her hair were still damp and dishevelled from her late and, undoubtedly, lukewarm bath.

  Forzan Paoul rose smoothly to his feet.

  “My daughter of sorts has deigned to join us, I take it,” said Ika, turning towards the noise of the opening door. “Forzan Paoul, allow me to present you to the Lady Yseld.”

  “We have already met, my lady,” he said – and Rian was not sure which one he was addressing, for his eyes were fixed on Yseld. “Two Crales ago, at the consecration of Bohod Thosk’s hall.”

  “You have the advantage of me, I’m afraid,” Yseld said. “I don’t remember.” But, from the faint reddening of Yseld’s cheeks, from the dissembled expression of alarm and astonishment with which she had set eyes on the young man, it was plain to a woman of Rian’s experience that she remembered him very well. “I must apologize. My father introduced me to so many people on that occasion.”

  “We spoke only for a few moments, my lady. I was merely one of the lamp-bearers.” And it seemed to Rian that Forzan Paoul’s memory was also better than he pretended. His expression, though, remained utterly unperturbed.

  Two Crales ago: that must have been shortly before the Thosk clan had begun negotiating the purchase of Yseld’s marriage into this branch of the Gehans. She would have been sixteen then, and Forzan Paoul about the same, or a little older.

  Looking at him as he sat down again, Rian could still not believe that anyone so youthful could be a red priest, with all the knowledge and wisdom that the title implied. Yet he had the composure of a full grown man, and the way he had acquitted himself so far was leading Rian to suspect that he could easily be underestimated. And there, on the back of his hand, was the proof, the five-pointed star that showed he had been accepted into the Red Order; and not at any vansery, either, but at Hohe, at the citadel itself.

  Yseld had come from somewhere near there. Her father’s estate, she had once told Rian, on one of her more confiding days, was often visited by Lord Heite. Presumably she and Forzan Paoul would have known several people in common and might have been expected to exchange polite enquiries and reminiscences, but, although sitting opposite him throughout the meal, Yseld preserved a disinterested aloofness which, while confirming Rian’s suspicions, also made her feel even more sorry for the girl.

  The “few moments” during which the two of them had spoken had clearly left a lasting impression on the young Lady Yseld. She had recognized him immediately. And if it had been impossible then for her to show her feelings – and not just because he was of the priesthood, although that in itself was more than reason enough – how must she be feeling now, under these circumstances, when she knew she would be seeing him every day?

  As for Forzan Paoul, Rian could not deduce what he was thinking or whether he had even noticed Yseld’s odd behaviour. During the meal he had managed to parry Ika’s remarks in such a way that each one had fallen spent before it could do any harm. As a result, Hothen had been unusually quiet and tractable. He had eaten consistently: crab soup, whiting with juniper sauce, roast woodcock, venison, raspberry clabber, dried fruit and cheese, and as he had eaten his skin seemed to have taken on a complacent gloss which extended to the blond roots of his hair. His glittering blue eyes, set in his fat, pink face, had darted occasional glances at Forzan Paoul in which Rian had detected a combination of admiration and fear. Was it possible that, at last, Hothen was trying to win the approval of one of his tutors?

  After the meal, once the dishes had been cleared and all but one of the servants had retired, Hothen, reviving a custom he had let lapse for some weeks, called for his scharan and began to play a tune. His tongue protruding wetly from the corner of his mouth, he crouched over the instrument, supporting it in his lap, and clumsily fretted the long neck of the fingerboard while his other hand drew mournful notes from the strings. He had learned the song from the under falconer, the story of a peregrine that had “raked away” and escaped. The words were maudlin and sentimental; although Hothen took them q
uite literally, it was not a peregrine the song was about, but the singer’s wife.

  Hothen was not proficient at music. This attempt to show off in front of his new tutor was making Rian feel embarrassed and uneasy. It was the certain forerunner of trouble. She knew the signs of old. Yseld knew them too. She was looking down at her hands, her teeth lightly pressed into her lower lip. Forzan Paoul, though, was unabashed. He was watching Hothen, studying his technique, on his face an expression of guarded approval, as if for the effort rather than the performance itself. Strangely, while he was singing Hothen never stammered; and while he was singing Ika was always entranced.

  At the end of the song her praise and applause were, as usual, the loudest and the most extravagant. Goaded by a defiant stare from her husband, Yseld quickly joined in, as did Rian, the food-taster, and the serving-maid. Everyone in the room was discovering new ways to congratulate the future Lord Brennis on his artistry and skill. Everyone, that is, except the one person for whose benefit the song had been performed.

  He had neither moved nor uttered a sound. He was sitting quite still, on his face exactly the same expression as before.

  Becoming aware of this, Hothen turned to him and the room fell silent; even Ika had sensed that something was wrong.

  Forzan Paoul waited a moment longer before speaking. Then, pleasantly, he said: “If you want my opinion, my lord, I think your playing leaves much to be desired.”

  The silence in the room grew to tremendous proportions. Rian felt herself pinned to the floor, helpless, horrified, and yet also curiously intrigued and detached, like someone who is both the witness and the victim of an impending natural disaster, a disaster of inconceivable ferocity and power – an avalanche, an earthquake, the end of the world. Hothen’s face was registering the difficulty he was having in comprehending the enormity of what had been said. As the play of emotion intensified, as it approached and passed through all the stages she knew so well, as it gathered momentum and entered a new and most dangerous region whose existence Rian had never before even suspected, she looked away and mentally braced herself, preparing for the onslaught of his rage.