by Tanith Lee
The second day, a man with a fur-edged robe, and a couple of henchmen behind him, came to the wagon mouth.
“Uasti,” he called out in a deep important voice.
It was the healer-woman’s name clearly, for she left her iron pot and opened the flap wider.
“What?”
“‘What?’ Is this the way to speak to me?”
“How else, Geret wagon master, if I want to know what you come seeking?”
I could see Geret was discomfited. He was used to having his way with people, a bully and organizer, perhaps quite intelligent in his limited fashion. He had the slightly bulbous eyes that seemed so common to his type, thin curled hair, and very red full lips. Now he gave a little laugh.
“I defer to your age, Uasti. An old woman’s privilege to be rude.”
“Quite right,” Uasti said. “And now?”
“And now, this girl I hear you’ve taken in—some Plains savage—”
I had been sitting among the rugs, half asleep, aimless and detached, but the bee’s sting reached me. I got up, and there was strength in my legs for the first time since I had run from my butchery.
“Very savage,” I said, leaning out over him, one hand on the nearest wagon strut, the other taking him lightly by the fur collar. “Have you heard of the warrior-women of the tribes? I am one, Geret of the wagons.”
Geret looked alarmed. He made a few brief noises, and I wondered why the two behind him did not come forward and detach my grasp. I glanced at them, and one was openly smirking. It appeared Geret was not a popular man. Yet it took Uasti to laugh.
“Let go of him, girl, before he wets his fine leggings.”
I let go. Geret flushed and pulled his robe straight.
“I had come,” he snapped, a little throatily, “to say she might stay with us, provided she worked for her food and comfort. Now, I think otherwise.”
“Oh, yes?” Uasti said. “And where will she go? We’re high in the Ring, Geret, and the snow is only a wish or so away. Does not the oldest law of the traveling people say, ‘Take in the stranger lest he die’?”
“Die? This one?” Geret looked skeptical. “She got up here by her own wits, let her use them and get down again. I’ll have none of the tribes in my place.”
“Your place? I must remember to tell Oroll and the other merchants what you say. And don’t look angry at me, Geret. Remember there’ll be illness and trouble enough coming for you to thank me when I cure it. Now, no more about She-in-my-wagon. I’ll take care of her and no bother to you. She eats hardly at all, so that needn’t lose you any sleep.”
Geret, furious, began to say something else.
“No,” Uasti cut in, sharp as a knife, “just you remember who I am, before who you are. You’ll be glad you did what I said if a fever comes on you, and I have to tend it.”
The menace in her words was unmistakable, and I saw for the first time, clearly, what power the healer had in her own community if she was good at her trade, and made them recollect it.
“Be damned!” Geret snapped, turned and made off.
The two henchmen offered brief respectful salutes to Uasti, and trudged after, grinning behind the wagon leader’s back.
2
So now I was Uasti’s. Her property, for I had my life at her demand. Yet it seemed she wanted nothing. It seemed so.
She let me wander where I wished, through the big cave into smaller caves, to be alone in the dank darkness. I was used to the hostility of these wagon riders. It was a familiar thing. Soon, if nothing happened, they would accept me, perhaps, in their own way. For now, they were a little afraid, and that was enough. When I went back to the wagon, she made no comment on arrival or absence. She would stroke the black cat, and offer me food, which I might accept or refuse as I liked. The girl chivied her, it is true, hating me for many varied reasons. Uasti would glance at me to see if it bothered me, and then tell her to go, or to be quiet, or to think of other things. The girl, in awe of the healer-woman, obeyed sullenly, but one evening, when Uasti was gone to see to some sick child, the girl came in and found me on my own. I had been mixing together some herbs which the old woman had asked me to do. This was a new thing, to set me tasks, but I could hardly refuse. I was going at it aimlessly, a pinch of this, a pinch of that, green and brown and gray stuff, when the girl came through the flap and ran straight at me.
“You! Who told you to meddle with that?” she screeched. This was her office, clearly, and she did not like to be usurped. Something occurred to me then, but I had no time to think of it at that moment. All the herbs went scattering, and she was tearing at my hair and beating at my chest, and trying to claw with her nails, but they were short and did not do much damage. She was bigger than I, but I was very strong and she had not reckoned on that. I got her hands and then her body and opened the flap and flung her out. It was not far, and I aimed her toward some rugs heaped up to dry by a fire, but I expect her bones rattled at the impact. She began to shriek and wail, and many women and a few men came up.
It seemed we were for the old trouble, when a cool amused voice, crackling as snakeskin through dry reeds, called out.
“What’s this, then? Rape—or has a wolf got into my wagon?”
A silence fell, and the crowd parted and let Uasti through. No one spoke or tried to stop her until she came to the rugs, and then the girl reached up and touched her wrist.
“Healer! She was mixing up the herbs—the Givers of Life—I saw her.”
“And so? I told her to do it.”
“Told her—? But that was my work!” the girl wailed, her face blank and pale.
“Well, it’s your work no longer, hussy. You can bring the food and water from here on, and no more.”
“Healer!” screamed the girl, grabbing at hand and sleeve now.
Uasti picked her off.
“If I decide otherwise, I’ll tell you,” Uasti said. “Until then, you are cook-girl.”
The girl curled over on herself and began to sob.
I was very angry with Uasti, for now I saw what was in her mind—to deprive one in need, and give to one who had no wish for it. She came into the wagon, dropped her bag of potions, and sat in the wooden chair.
I sat by the flap, and said to her, “Why do that? She had served you many years, and was apprentice to your trade.”
“Why? Because she’s a fool and a sniveler. Years, you say, since twelve, five years in all, and she has learned little enough. She’s no instinct for it. And the Touch isn’t in her fingers. I’d thought there was nothing better.”
“Until now,” I said.
Uasti moved her hands noncommittally. “It remains to be seen.”
The black cat rubbed by me on its way to take possession of her knees.
“Cat likes you,” Uasti said. “She never liked that other one.”
“Uasti,” I said, “I am not a healer.”
“Not a healer? Oh, yes. And a stone is not a stone, and the sea is made of black beer, and men run backward.”
“Uasti, I am not a healer.”
“You’re a strange one,” she said. “You’ve more power in your eyes than in your fingers, and more power in your fingers than I in mine, and you let it lie.”
“I have no power.”
“But you’ve healed before. Yes, I know it. I can smell it on you.”
“I did not heal. It was their belief I could, not I that healed them.”
I said this before I could keep the words back, and Uasti smiled a little, glad I had committed myself. I became very angry then, and all the hurt and fear and bewilderment crowded in on me. Who knew better than I that in showing another his or her fears, one finds one’s own? Yet I could not help it. It was dark in the wagon, the flaps down, only Uasti’s bright eyes and the bright eyes of the cat gleaming at me, two above two.
“Uasti, healer-woman,” I said, and my voice was a pale iron shaft through that dark, “I come from earth guts, and I have lived with men in the stamp they have given me which was not of my choosing. I have been goddess and healer and bandit and warrior, and archer too, and beloved, and for all this I have suffered, and the men and women who set me in the mold of my suffering have suffered also because of me. I will not run between the shafts anymore. I must be my own and no other’s. I must find my soul-kin before I corrupt myself with the black impulse which is in me. Do you understand, Uasti of the wagon people?”
The two pairs of ice-bright beads stared back, a creature without form, seeing, waiting.
“Look, Uasti,” I said, and I dragged the brazier near me, and poked it into life, then pulled the shireen away from my face.
By the flicker of the coals, I saw Uasti’s old woman’s face draw in on itself, the lines suddenly harder etched. The cat bristled and rose, spitting, its ears flat to its head.
“Yes, Uasti,” I said, “now you see.”
And I put on the mask again, and sat looking at her.
She did not move for a moment, then she quieted the cat, and her own face was expressionless.
“Indeed I see. More than you think, you who are of the Lost Ones.”
I cringed at that name, but she lifted her hand.
“Come here, lostling.” And I went to her, and kneeled before her, because there was nothing else I could do, while the cat jumped from her lap and ran somewhere in the wagon to shelter from me.
“Yes,” Uasti said, “I know a little. It’s legend now, but legend is the smoke from the fire, and the wood that the fire consumes is the substance. When I was a little thing, many, many years ago, and they saw I had the healing touch, my village sent me to live with a wild race in the hills, and there I learned my trade. They were a strange people, wanderers, they went from place to place, but they believed they had the eye of a god, a great god, greater than any other, and, wherever they went, they carried a box of yellow metal, and in the box was a book. It was written in a strange tongue, and some of the old ones said they could read it, but I am not so sure of that. They’d chew a herb they grew in little pitchers of earth, and lie in dark places, and have dreams about the Book. But they knew the legends of the old lost race without the trances. There was an inscription on the cover of that Book. The cover was gold, and the joints were gold, and the inscription was all I ever saw. They never let a woman look inside it.” Uasti lifted aside the rugs, picked up the iron which was used to stir the brazier, and sprinkled something from an open vessel on the bare floor. With the hot metal she traced out the words:
BETHEZ TE-AM
And then she glanced at me.
“Well, lostling?”
Those words, so close to me in the green dust she had sprinkled, not spoken because of their power—how new and alien they seemed, for I sensed no evil in them, only a great sorrowing.
“Herein the truth,” I said.
“They called it the Book of the True Word,” Uasti said. “Their god had dictated it, but the legends knew better, and the healers knew better too. So I learned.”
3
I thought that I had been one with Darak, in my fashion, forgetting oneness does not come from the body alone. Now I became one with the strange old woman of the wagon people—by an almost imperceptible process that sprang from understanding.
The day after we had spoken together in the wagon, the storm lifted and the camp pressed on. It was late in the year for traveling, the snow very close, brooding behind whitish-gray skies adrift with cloud clots. A boy drove our wagon, and the little shaggy horses which pulled it. Uasti often got out to walk, and I walked with her. She was very brisk and strong, and the cold slid off her like water off a turtle’s shell. I did not see the girl who had been her apprentice, except when she brought Uasti’s food. Then she did not look at me, but only at Uasti, pleadingly, like a dog.
But all these things were little things beside the oneness.
In fact, she had not told me so much, but she had known, and that had been a wonderful release for me. The legends they had told her, the strange wild men and women of that savage tribe where she had learned her healing arts, were many-colored and many-faceted, and, as with any legend, one must read between the words, being skeptical but not too much so, sifting and rejecting and searching. There had been a race—the Lost, the Book of the tribe called them, a great race, skilled in the Power, healers and magicians of genius. But evil had possessed them and eaten them and spewed them up again in a new form. Then they ruled with hate, malice, and corruption. In the end a disease had come, nameless yet terrible, and they had died in droves, in the very acts of pleasure that had damned them. Some were buried in the magnificent mausoleums of their ancestors, others, having none left to bury them, rotted in their palaces, and became at last white bones among the white bones of their cities, and even the bones perished. And so they were no more. But the Book, or so the priests said, had persisted in its cry that the old race were not made up of evil and hatred only. Their symbol had been the phoenix, the fire-bird rising from its own ashes. There would be a second coming—and gods and goddesses would walk the earth again.
I do not know if Uasti believed me to be one of that second coming. Certainly there was little enough goddess in me. She never asked me where I came from or what I knew, and I never told her more than I had that day when I pulled the shireen from my face. Yet there was this sharing. She began to teach me her arts, very simple and humble in their way, and I found a response in me. I wanted—needed to know.
The wagoners were beginning to accept me. When I went among them with Uasti they scarcely noticed now, and once or twice, when I walked on my own away from the wagons, at night, when they were in the shelter of some cave or other, people would come and ask me to tell Uasti this or that. And once I found a lost girl-child in some cave alley, crying, and when I led her back to the firelight, she came very trustingly and put her hand in mine. I am not a one for children, there is not enough human woman in me for that, but a child’s trust is a remarkable compliment, and it touched me.
That night I wept for Darak, silently, in the wagon, and, although I was silent, I knew Uasti heard my grief, but she did not come to question or comfort, knowing, wise one, there was nothing she could do.
The next day it was better.
Oh, yes, he will always be there in me. I have good reason to remember, but, like the old wound, it throbs only at certain seasons, and then one is well used to it.
* * *
The eighth day after I had come to them, the snow began to fall all around us, thick and white.
The pass was narrow, the crags going up on every side and away into their own gray distances. The snow would choke the way eventually, bring down boulders and avalanches of loose stuff and torn-up pines. There were also the wolves who came out at us soon as the whiteness was down. They were not very big, whitish in color, but with flaming eyes. They harried us like an army hidden in among the rocks. The children and the sick or weakly were shut firmly in the wagons, as were the stores of food. Riders went on the outside of the caravan, holding burning tar-torches with which they thrust at the wolves. But the horses did not like our new companions, and it was a weary, noisy, irritable time.
For all the caravan was officially led by the most important merchants traveling with it—Oroll, Geret, and two or three others—it lacked organization, and there were constant disputes between the “leaders.” I had been wondering how they would get across the Ring at all with the snow coming so fast, for it could only be the first snow of many. Uasti told me there was a tunnel soon, through the mountain rock itself, a sheltered black passageway hewn out long ago. She did not say the human slaves of the Old Race had made it, but I thought it was so. Now an argument broke out among the wagons as to whether we should make on toward this place or hole up in some
cave until the brief thaw that generally comes after this first snowfall. Geret and another were for waiting, Oroll and the rest were for pressing on. Fairly soon the caravan had split into factions. There were fights, and bleeding noses and broken knuckles for Uasti to heal. Finally, in the refuge of a cave, the snow piled high outside, fires blazing at the cave-mouth to keep the howling wolves away, they came to Uasti, and demanded she read the auguries.
With men it is always this way, they will ignore their gods until they are in trouble or need, and then they will turn to them with sudden fervor and belief. The god of the wagoners was a small, white image, rough-hewn and only a foot or so in height. They carried it in the spice wagon and so it came out reeking of herbs, cinnamon, musk, and pepper, and was dumped by sneezing porters in the back of the cave. They called it Sibbos, and it was a man-god, and they had a special red and yellow robe that they brought out for it now, and put on it, together with necklets and rings and colored beads. It had an expressionless, unpainted face, and there was no special aura to it, for it was not worshiped often enough to have taken on any personality of its own, as do the vast statues of the temple gods, who are feared and called to every day of the year.
I had been learning Uasti’s medicine for some days now; not so much the binding of wounds and setting of limbs, but those other arts which are deeper and more profound.
Now, after Geret and his men had gone, she turned to me and said, “I’m old for this work. You shall do it.”
I did not want any part of their religion, and I told her so. I had thought she understood my needs and antipathies.
“Yes,” she said, “but I understand too that in your way you must get power over others. That’s your heritage, and you can’t shy away from it forever. Here is power in a small way, and you must take it, and learn to control both others and yourself.”
Then she took out a black robe with long sleeves, and a black belt to pull it in at the waist, and made me put them on. They were her things, but she was a slim, small woman, and they fitted me well, too well, perhaps. I stood silent then, while she told me what I must do, a strange figure, white hands and feet and hair, black mask-face, and black body. She put the necessary things into my fingers, opened the flap, and told me to go.