by Tanith Lee
It grew darker the farther into the passage I went, until a small light appeared ahead of me. As I came nearer, the light resolved itself into a lamp held firmly in a plump black-gloved hand. The priest wore black holy robes stitched with silver. Somehow, from the size and set of his silver mask, I was able to tell that his face was fattish, a little too small for his body, and narrow at the forehead—not the head of a clever man.
He bowed.
“Goddess.”
A smooth oily voice. Did he believe what he spoke? I sensed that he did not, and yet that he was convincing himself that he did—a curious paradox I had no time to think of.
“Take me there,” I said.
He turned at once and moved off, through the warren of dark corridors beneath the Temple of Uastis.
* * *
The statue in the Temple is more than a giant, it is a colossus. Her head touches the roof beams, the fingernails of her smallest fingers are the size of a man’s skull. At her festivals she is unveiled, and stands in all her beauty, lit by lamps burning on chains from the roof, which light only her and not the places below. She is naked gold to her hips, her sex and thighs and legs covered with a golden drapery of skirt held by a wide belt of gold studded with green stones and jade. Around her neck is a golden collar hung with droplets of jade which depend onto her breasts. These jades are each larger than a woman’s body. Her hair is made of gold wire plaits and silver wool, and her head is the head of the cat.
In the little dim-lit room, two priestesses with silver flower faces covered my neck, shoulders, arms and breasts, my stomach and back, my hands and feet with a scented yellow cream. When the cream dried, it hardened on my flesh like a new skin of burnished gold. Around my hips to my ankles they draped the stiff golden skirt. The golden belt was fastened at my hips, the golden collar was fastened at my throat, and the jades rang cold on my breasts. They turned aside as I put off the silver mask and put on the cat’s face Vazkor had sent me. I wondered who had made this mask, and if they too had died, knowing too much. The priestesses combed out my long hair and added nothing. White is sister to silver.
Then, having prepared me themselves, they fell on their faces, and whimpered in apparent terror of my god-head.
The priest returned, and led me through another corridor, to a small black stone door. A secret lock, geared to his touch alone. The door rasped open. Stooping at the low lintel, I went through. The door shut.
Steps. Many, many steps. My bare feet stirred a faint brushing echo. A platform and another door. Outside, the narrow ledge and the drop of over a hundred feet to the Temple floor.
Who, looking up, would see the tiny blemish in the goddess’ belly, just above the knot of her skirt? A tiny oval scar on her immortal frame, which was the door.
Outside, the dim roar and breathing sound of worship. I had only to wait for the single cry, the cry of the chief priest—“Come forth!” Each festival the cry came, a matter of ceremony only, but on this day the entreaty would be answered. Abruptly, my skin turned icy, my knees shook. I imagined stepping out onto the narrow ledge, losing consciousness, falling, regaining my senses in time to experience the impact of the stone flags. It was pitch-dark in the belly of Uastis. Trembling, I sheltered against the metal wall, afraid to hear the cry at any second. No need for fear. I would not go out. Yes, and then Vazkor would punish me—some slow death which was not death—a constant agony, endless torture. And yet I was more powerful than he. Karrakaz had slunk down before me. I straightened a little, but I longed for him to come, fling open the door, and carry me back down the steps in his arms. To be safe and to be his, my love whom I could not help but love, because I had loved him before our meeting. Weak with this longing and with the self-anger which accompanied it, I leaned against the door. And the cry came.
“Come forth!”
It belled and echoed, even here, the great voice in the silence of religion beyond the door.
On impulse, because it had been planned, not thinking, I thrust at the metal—first left, then right—and the ancient spring responded. The door raised slowly up, and the Temple lay yawning before me, black, glittering with a million small lights like the eyes of waiting animals.
I stepped out onto the ledge, not so narrow as it seemed, amid the lamp-glare that surrounded the goddess. One great rushing sigh of shock rose like the thrust of the sea below me. I could not see their faces, only knew that every face was lifted to me. The door slid down again behind me; no way back. Yet, it was unreal to me now.
After a while the chief priest’s voice called up to me. I could not see him, yet the voice was shaken, and not quite in control.
“Who is this, that dares answer our prayer, which may be answered only by the goddess?”
“I am the goddess,” I said. The clear words dropped down among them like glass beads into a pool. “I am Uastis Reincarnate. I am the True Coming, the Risen One, She you have waited for.”
Below, the Temple seemed to swing back and forth like a great ship at sea. A small white fleck, the flame in the altar bowl, pulled at my eyes. Numbly, with my right sole, I sought the grooves of the ledge, and found them at last. My toes exerted their light pressure, straining the tendons of my foot. A faint hoarse hum of ancient machinery stirring, rusty from aeons of disuse, misuse. The ledge jolted only a little. It began to move, slowly, down the length of the goddess’ skirt, toward the floor.
Shouts and exclamations, a few women screaming. Perhaps the priests knew of this thing, but not the people of the City. Perhaps not even the priests, only Vazkor and his. The sensation was of levitation, so smooth was the passage now. The great lamps grew dimmer behind me. The blackness of the Temple swallowed me up.
Blind, I stared at them through the holes of the mask. I could not see a single face, only the little taper lights and the dark. Despite the sense of many people, I felt quite alone.
And then the man came toward me. Gradually his dark robes grew evident, the golden lion mask with its golden crest—the chief priest. A few feet from me, I checked him.
“No closer,” I said.
He seemed tall now, certain. He spoke, and I heard an anger in his voice.
“We must know if this is true holiness before us.”
“Must the goddess prove herself?”
He stood straight, and folded his arms—a gesture of total and insolent challenge.
I looked at him and knew his mortality. I felt the burning contempt brim my eyes like tears. I pointed at him, and contempt ran down my finger and leaped from the gilded tip in a thin white ray. It caught him in the chest, but his whole body blazed whitely for a second, lighting up the Temple. He fell backward without a sound. In its bowl the flame, which to me was Karrakaz, leaped and cowered.
The Temple groaned and mumbled. I heard them kneeling, groveling, heavy robes scraping, jewelry ringing on the stone floor.
I saw better now. I made out the line of thirty priests prostrate before me on the stairway, whispering their prayers, the people, the lords and their women bowed over as if sick. On the raised places, on golden chairs, I saw the high ones under the purple canopy of the Javhovor, each and every person in an attitude of terrified submission. Except for one.
Near to the back of the great hall, one masked face raised, one body straight. Yes, but he would submit, he would not dare to let them see, as yet, he had no fear of the goddess. Now he kneeled, now his head dropped forward. Vazkor offered me his empty homage.
5
A new prison. The Temple, like every other place, was proved to be a trap. Thirty days passed, and I remember little of them; they might have been only one long day, each was so like the rest.
Every morning early, I would rise, and the women would come to bathe and dress me. They would not always gild my skin, except on every fourth day when I must stand in the Temple. I would wear a robe of pleated black linen, tight at sleeves
and waist, arranged at the skirt in many complicated folds. Great collars of gold, golden bracelets, finger and toe rings and girdles were fastened around my body like armor, or chains. Only the golden cat mask pleased me still, for it seemed more my face than my own.
In my basalt cage, I would sit on a high-backed chair, and men and women would come in to me, and throw themselves down. Their clothes were very rich, and their jewelry crashed against the marble. Only the gold or silver ones gained access to their goddess. Here was I again in the village Temple, or among the bandit tents. They begged me for health, for the love of others, for power, both temporal and of the spirit. Sickness I could remove with a touch, but emotional command over their fellows I would not give them. That was my right, not theirs. To their cries for honor and position I referred them to the Javhovor. On the days when I stood in the Temple, thousands came and bowed down before me. Women screamed and wept. Yet I was impotent, I waited in the shadow of a man they had forgotten. In those days of acting like a mindless machine, I grew very like one. I scarcely seemed to think at all, or to feel.
The fat priest Oparr, who had led me to the statue, was my principal attendant, and I supposed, Vazkor’s spy. He ushered in my visitors, and stood behind my chair while they groveled. He now had become my chief priest, in the wake of the votary I had killed, but he was Vazkor’s man. Vazkor had raised Oparr from obscure nothingness (this much was evident), planted him like a rank weed in the Temple garden, and watered where he could his growth there. Now the weed was the tree-pillar of Vazkor’s house. What other men he had set in high places, I did not yet know, but I guessed there would be many, all with a taste for command and for the good things it brought, very loyal to the man who had given them so much, and too stupid to see even further profit in overthrowing their benefactor. Clever Vazkor; yet he had gambled with me.
The City had been in tumult at my rising, yet I did not see it. The other five allied Cities of the White Desert were looking frenziedly to their own altars.
My place in the Temple was very quiet. The windows stared out upon courtyards and great leafless trees. On the thirtieth day of my god-head and imprisonment, snow fell and turned the black stones white. It was the first winter I had seen—I recalled no cold time from my lost childhood. Worse than in the mountains, this snow. It fell without a sound, and now the desert would be white indeed.
* * *
“The Javhovor is coming,” Oparr said, standing fat before me. “The Javhovor asks that the goddess will grant him a little time in her holy presence.”
“Where is Vazkor?” I asked at once.
“Vazkor, High Commander, will naturally attend his lord, the Javhovor.”
“When?”
“The time it will take the Javhovor’s ring bird to fly back to the palace.”
I had not seen Vazkor all this time. I did not know what he desired me to do or say to his overlord, this man he intended to replace. I gave Oparr one of my golden rings to put on the leg of the carrier bird, accepted in exchange the gold ring of the Javhovor, set with an onyx and carved with the crest of the phoenix.
It did not take long. I suppose they came through the snow, but the way was cleared for them. I am not certain what I expected, but I think I was looking for a Raspar of Ankurum, even another Geret perhaps.
The Javhovor entered, attended by three men only, and one of these was Vazkor. The Javhovor was tall, straightly and slimly built. The golden phoenix mask he drew off at once, presumably out of respect for me. His face was delicately shaped, chiseled too fine perhaps, extraordinarily beautiful, and yet not feminine in the least, and he was very young, not more than sixteen years of age.
Despite his youth he was poised, quiet and elegant in his movements. He bowed to me deeply, but did not fall down as the others had. His skin was pale and clear, the eyes an intense black-blue. In the lamplight of the room his long hair shone golden as the mask he had removed from it.
“I am your servant, goddess,” he said gravely, and I sensed a spark of polite defiance in him for the one who had come so abruptly from nowhere.
“What does the lord desire of Uastis?” I inquired. It was the usual manner of asking those who came to me.
“To pay my respects. To see the goddess for myself. To question her, if she permits. I am very curious; I hope the goddess will not be angry.”
“Curiosity,” I said, “does not generally move the anger of the gods.”
He smiled, courteous and unruffled. Half turning, he spoke to his three companions. “You may leave us.”
“My lord,” the tall man with the wolf’s mask said, “it is unfitting you should have no guard.”
“Vazkor, Vazkor, I am not afraid. The goddess is my guard against all harm.”
They left him, Vazkor also, and then Oparr, sliding his smooth unctuous passage out of the room. We were alone, the Javhovor of Ezlann and I.
There was a single bench against one wall. Now he carried it forward and sat on it. His slenderness had misled me, I had not thought him particularly strong, yet the bench was marble, and a big cumbersome thing. He sat easily, looking into my mask face, because of the bench, a little lower than I.
“May I ask what I want?”
“You may ask,” I said.
“And the answers are at the goddess’ discretion? I understand well. Where did you come from, goddess?”
It was hard to make an assessment. Vazkor had sent me no warning. I had not expected to meet such courteous probing.
“From the Old Race,” I said.
“But the Old Race is gone, goddess. They say you slept, then woke.”
“Yes,” I said, “beneath a far mountain.”
“And now you have come to Ezlann. Why?”
“Ezlann is my City. She has worshiped me since before my waking.”
“How did the goddess come to Ezlann?”
“I came here,” I said. “That is enough.”
“And how did the goddess enter the Temple, learn of the hidden door and the secret machinery?”
“I entered,” I said, “and I learned. That is enough.”
“There is a legend already,” he said, “that Uastis in the form of the golden phoenix flew through the stone wall of her Temple, and burned herself in the watchfire at the altar, and rose again. They say she has lived among many peoples and been their god, that she has died and returned to life, that the look of her face is so terrible it will turn to stone any man that sees it, that her body is filled with a serpent, and her brain is hewn from jade.”
“Some things are hidden,” I said.
“Once,” he said softly, not looking at me, “an assassin was sent to kill my High Commander, Vazkor. He has enemies, goddess, and these things happen. Usually men die. I have heard what happened—Vazkor’s guard ran in and found the man had stabbed him several times in the chest and throat, yet it was the murderer who was dead. Vazkor had snapped his neck in the very act of killing. They assumed Vazkor would perish from his wounds, but he did not. You have seen as much. And this I know”—he looked at me and smiled—“because I, too, must have spies, goddess.”
I was not sure what I should do. I said nothing. After a moment the Javhovor rose.
“Power,” he said. “I know you could blast me where I stand, as you did the priest. But you are not an angry goddess. There is another part to the legend. Have you heard it?”
My only strength was in silence, so I waited.
“The legend states that the goddess will take as husband the High-Lord of her City. A parable of unity between religion and the state. Already the people of Ezlann are calling for it.”
Yes, he was very dangerous, perhaps more dangerous than Vazkor, for his weapon was honesty. I wondered what Vazkor would want from me in this situation, and wondered also what I would want.
“You,” I said, “are mortal.”
; “Of course,” he said, “very mortal. The assassin who puts a knife in my heart need fear nothing further from me.”
“I do not know what to say to you,” I said. “I must have time to seek an answer within myself.”
He bowed, and smiled again, without warmth.
“There are prayers daily in your Temple for our union. Such a passion for tidiness.”
He put on the phoenix mask, and turned toward the doors. As he drew near, they were whisked open by his servants outside, who must have been listening all the time, surely, to be able to judge his exit so perfectly.
Soon Oparr returned.
“Did you hear what was said?” I asked him.
“I? But, goddess, I was not present.”
“Naturally,” I said, “there is some spy-hole that looks into this room.”
He was silent, and the gloved hands twitched uneasily in the folds of his robe.
“Listen, Oparr,” I said. “You are Vazkor’s man, but I am loyal to him also—you have seen as much. We must work together, we three, or your master’s schemes will come to nothing. The interview I have just had might have gone better if you had warned me beforehand what the Javhovor would say. Now, get word to Vazkor, and ask him what I must answer, and what I must do.”
Oparr stood quiet a moment, then he bowed low, murmured “Goddess,” and went out.
Part of me had hoped that Vazkor would come himself, but he did not come. It would, after all, have been a foolish thing to do. Instead, Oparr slunk in to me at midnight, as the women were preparing my bed for sleep.
“Well?” I asked him.
“Yes, goddess,” he said.
“Yes? What do you mean?”
“To all that has been asked, the answer must be ‘yes.’”
I had guessed as much, but it infuriated me. As ever, I was bought and sold. Using all the force of my hate, I struck Oparr across the head and neck. He staggered and fell down. For a while he lay on the floor, groaning at the pain and the injustice.