The Birthgrave

by Tanith Lee

  She nodded dumbly, and turned at once.

  It was a long journey. Two guards came behind us, and they had a lamp, which at first seemed unnecessary. But soon the lighted corridors were behind us. We went through dark, earth-smelling ways deep under the palace, through old and neglected cellars crusted with dust and misty with hanging gray webs, down worn staircases that twisted round and round on themselves in the shadows. It looked a dangerous way for her to come. I remember it surprised me she did not seem afraid of it. At last there was a level corridor, and, at the end, a great iron door. She moved her fingers in the grooves and it lumbered unwillingly open.

  What lay beyond filled me with bitter fury.

  Some earth-heap in the desert would have angered me less.

  Black velvet draped the five walls of this underground chamber, which reeked of dust and neglect. Despite the drapery, the floor had not been swept clean. Filthy scraps of cloth and glass lay scattered everywhere. Damp would soon eat holes in everything. At the center of the room, a black draped slab—wood or stone, I did not know. On this rested the ornate tomb-cask of a High-Lord—cedar wood plated with gold, ornamented with phoenixes and serpents, set with blue stones and jades, nailed shut with diamond-headed nails. Around the cask flowers had been scattered to wither, adding their decay to the rest, precious oils had been spilled, and now ran sticky, rancid and evil-smelling down the cracks of the floor.

  The guards waited in the corridor, the girl slid into a corner, wide-eyed as I walked round and round the coffin until my anger, like a pain, eased a little. The girl had begun to weep again, for him, I think, this time. The aching loss I felt must be unbearable to her; she, after all, had known him and been one with him.

  “If you wish to stay a while, I will wait for you in the corridor,” I said, but she choked off her sobs immediately, and ran after me.

  So she led us back the long dismal way. We reached my apartments and I beckoned her inside. I thanked her, but she did not seem to understand the thanking.

  “Later,” I said, “if I can, I shall have him reburied, openly, and with honor, in the tradition of Ezlann.”

  But she did not comprehend, and, anyway, how empty it seemed, all of it, how pointless, for he could not enjoy or suffer anything of it now. Yet I could not get the filthy room from my mind.

  I let her go after that. She was so afraid I could not keep her another moment. I had wanted to ask her for something of his, some small thing he had given her that meant less than the others, but I knew she would give me the best and dearest because she was so frightened, and besides this, it seemed such a desolate thing to ask. So, I said nothing and regretted it later.

  There were many dreams that night, formless but terrifying. Waking, I recollected only the stone bowl and the flame whose name was Karrakaz, and the words of the curse, and how I cried out that I was stronger, much stronger than the he-she thing in the bowl.

  The next day there were preparations for departure, and, at sunset, I must go to the Temple and bless Ezlann for the last time, though, it is true, they expected me to return. As I stood there in the stiff gold things, my eyes never once left the bowl where the flame burned. Yet the flame was very still and no voice spoke unspeaking in my brain: “I am Karrakaz the Soulless One, who sprang from the evil of your race . . . there is no escape . . . you are cursed and carry a curse with you . . . there will be no happiness. Your palaces are in ruins. The lizards sun themselves . . . the fallen courts . . . let me show you what you are.”

  Part IV: War March

  1

  WHEN I LEFT the village under the volcano, the crowds stood sullen and fearful at my going; women had wept and plucked at me. And later, from the amphitheater of the hills, I had looked back, and seen the scarlet lamp which was the village’s burning in the volcano’s second aftermath. Now I rode with Vazkor, though not side by side, not even with the remote nearness I had had then to Darak. Hundreds of inanimate and living things separated us: soldiers splendidly clothed; horses incredibly appareled in silken body drapes with purple ribbons plaited in manes and tails, and golden nuggets on harness; wagons of provisions dragged along by mules; even the levies from the steadings, trapped out as soldiers in leather, but unmasked, their eyes and faces dead as I had seen them first.

  Bells were ringing in Ezlann, deep and endless, and crowds milled at the edges of the streets and on the balconies. I rode in my open chariot, a ceremonial thing which would be discarded at the gate for a carriage. The people shouted, and cheered us. It was more than the procession of a goddess and a king—this was the magnificent riding of the warlord to his war. Beyond White Desert stretched the War March, the jousting place, where each alliance did battle with the others, yet Vazkor knew, and others too, perhaps, that his war march began at the back gate of Ezlann. Every city was a prize to him, conquest and power, something to blot the running wound of his pride, for a time. Yes, even more than this, not only the Cities of the south, but everything outside his own body, even the body itself, must be subdued and held in iron to satisfy the craving of his mind.

  The cheers and bells rang on and on. So unlike the village, so unlike. But then, their goddess had not really left them; her Power was everywhere, in the great statues still, and in the person of her chief priest Oparr.

  I almost laughed.

  At my back rode eighty men, phoenix-masked, each bearing on the right side of the breast the golden cat, each ten groups of seven captained by an eighth man who wore a green sash about his waist. This had not been my idea but Mazlek’s, presumably. Yet no one could now mistake the Honorary Guard of the Goddess. I did not know how they had settled with the smiths and dye merchants, for I had no revenue of my own.

  * * *

  It took us fourteen days to reach Za, more than twice as long as it would take a single mounted man, but so it is with caravans of any sort. There was little of individual interest to me; for most of the time I was immured in my traveling carriage—a stuffy gilded box, that left me each night stiff and aching, and was drawn by four toiling and temperamental mules. Several times each day the carriage would judder to a halt, and I would hear the drivers arguing and cajoling, while the mules stood regarding them with polite interest, until leather-thong whips were applied.

  I had brought only two women with me—the prettiest, because it had occurred to me I should have to look at them a great deal—but they were petulant and uneasy, frightened of me at such close and prolonged quarters; and their conversation, when it came in little bursts, was the hollow chatter of fools.

  Each night a camp was made, a military and architectural undertaking, which helped put days on our journey. First, about late afternoon the foot soldiers would be marched briskly ahead, reach the proposed site, and begin to erect there the movable metal walls carried by their pack horses. By the time the mounted men and carriages arrived, the camp was securely walled by five-foot-high sections of iron with quaint little gates in them, and the tents and pavilions were going up. Sentries were posted, horses were quartered and fed, and fires accurately built and cooked over. For the dark, we were a town, and a rowdy town at that. Despite the efficient iron walls and sentries, drunks roamed the lanes all night hotly pursued by furious superiors, horses broke loose and galloped about, snorting and defecating and knocking into things. The scattering of prostitutes held nightly revels in their gaudy arbors at the camp’s lower end, and at first there was fighting on every side, due to absurd rivalries between one section of soldiers and another. Fierce and individual loyalties existed; whichever captain a man served was better than any other captain, an egoist extension of self that apparently went unrecognized. Each dawn discovered the dead and dying remains of these ridiculous fracases, until Vazkor put a stop to it by threat of execution in the cold and sober morning for all who drew sword on a brother soldier. There were three of these executions, however, before the new law penetrated to their brains.

 
Vazkor’s pavilion was the centerpiece of the camp. Mine stood a lane or so away, under the protection of my own guard. There had been no fighting among Mazlek’s men, I had noticed, neither did any of the regular troops come to challenge them.

  In the icy-red daybreaks of winter the camp would fold itself up and prepare for departure. The Ezlanns, for whom all natural functions had assumed such colossal taboos, were cleverly secretive in all that was necessary. The levied steaders, as if in studied insult, ate and drank and performed all other bodily duties quite in the open. They were regarded as animals, and so behaved as animals, and curiously, in so doing, had achieved something of an animal’s dignity. No longer was there disgust and pity in me for men tied to such necessities; it was the secretive and denying Ezlanns I pitied now.

  The greater part of the journey, as I have said, was deathly to me. I had brought books with me from Asren’s library, but the jolting of the carriage and the dim light made reading while in motion quite impossible. Only at night could I turn to them, and then I did not read, for the ghost of him was in every page I touched and brought its own peculiar melancholy. The winter scenes from the small carriage window—all blank whiteness, very flat, with snow-haze on the near horizon obscuring sky or possible mountains—gave me dead, pale dreams at night. Nothing seemed to live in the desert, not even snow wolves and bears as on the Ring. The caravan itself made a great noise, but beyond that clamor there seemed nothing, nothing at all.

  At the dawn of the tenth day of journeying I called Mazlek into my pavilion.

  “Mazlek, find me a horse to ride, and some sort of man’s clothing to fit me, so that I can ride it.”

  He looked astonished.

  “But, goddess—” He hesitated. Then he said, “It would have to be boy’s clothes—and, does the goddess realize how cold it is?”

  Despite his argument, the clothes came, plain black and, though clean, I could see they had been worn before. I donned the leggings, knee-length side-slit tunic, and the boots. Drawing the belt far around on itself, and forced to cut a new notch for the catch, it came to me suddenly, with unexpected pain, how I had put on the bandit boy’s clothes in the ravine, Darak standing behind me. There was a cloak Mazlek had brought, black also, but lined with some animal’s thick gray fur—the fur of several animals, in fact, for I could tell from the markings, and the little joins where each skin met the other. I counted the skins so I should know when I rode through the day if it were twelve or fourteen deaths which kept me warm. I pulled my own gauntlets on my hands, gold stitched. They, and the golden mask, no doubt looked quite incongruous with my new apparel.

  Outside a black mare waited. They had picked me a very docile and well-behaved one. They could not know how I had leaped the furious brown horses in the woods with Maggur.

  I swung onto the mare’s back lightly, causing enormous surprise. It was curiously emotive to me to feel once more a living creature between my thighs, that phenomenon which seems always to evoke a sexual imagery, and yet, for me at least, spells a kind of elemental freedom. I had known men of Darak’s who had been “one” with their horses, and I understand very well what they meant, though there had been no horse-mate for me. I leaned over the mare’s neck and stroked her, and looking up, saw Vazkor across the semi-dismantled tent lanes which divided us. He turned immediately and spoke to a man who came running instantly to me.

  “Goddess,” the man called up to me, “Vazkor Javhovor asks if he may speak with you.”

  It amused me very much, this deference he exhibited in public—because he must.

  “Certainly,” I said. I turned the horse, and rode leisurely toward him, startled men gawping at me on every side. Even some of the steaders turned their blank faces to look as they sat gnawing their bread.

  “Well, Vazkor,” I said, looking down at him for once, a petty thing, but still it was pleasant enough.

  “Will the goddess deign to enter my pavilion?” he asked.

  “The goddess will deign,” I said.

  He put up a hand to help me down, and ignoring it, I dismounted easily and walked into the pavilion first. I had not seen it before, but it was black and austere as the exterior, with a few burning lamps, a brazier, and ebony desk neatly stacked with maps and various military objects. The flap fell shut, and it was very dark, despite the lamplight.

  “Goddess,” he said, “I would strongly advise you to continue this journey as you were—in your carriage.”

  “Vazkor,” I said, “I would strongly advise you not to advise me.”

  “You must understand,” he said harshly, “that being a goddess entails certain obligations of dignity. Ride in this manner, in that inelegant clothing, and you will destroy your own image.”

  “I have ridden many times. I shall not fall off. If you object to my clothing, find someone who can make me riding clothes to which you do not object, providing, of course, you do not expect them to include a skirt.”

  He was masked and did not remove the mask. He stood stone-still and said, “This is very stupid of you. Beyond a certain point your stupidity will outweigh any use you might be to me.”

  His voice was emotionless and very quiet. In spite of myself, a little coldness ran through me, and I knew myself still afraid of him. Yet what could he do to me that would not mend or heal? Perhaps it was more a desire in me to fear him than an actual fear which I felt. I shook it all from me.

  “Brother,” I said, using against him that kinship he used against me, “we must not quarrel over such trivia. I will do as I please, and you will do as you please, and while it serves both of us to help the other, we will do so. You cannot ride into Za without Uastis.”

  There was a brief silence. Then he said, “Tonight I will send you a tailor. We will leave it at that.”

  It was a defeat for him, yet it frightened me a little.

  I went out, remounted, and rode out that day at the head of my guard, Mazlek behind me, leaving the carriage to my women and their fool’s chatter.

  * * *

  From the horse, the white dead world was not so different. Once a flock of birds flew over, calling, going away to the east.

  The tailor came by night, and a scared woman, to fit me. I wore fine black wool now, a black slit tunic of velvet, slashed gold. The boots had gold buckles; the cloak was lined with a white bear fur, almost indistinguishable from my hair.

  Late on the twelfth day, we passed through a village of the Dark People, huddled around a frozen fall among some rocks. Men were out chipping the ice for water, but, as I recalled, the women, animals, and children were hidden away elsewhere. Vazkor’s soldiers went through the village, and appropriated jars of oil and a store of wood, and also, more surreptitiously, leather skins of beer. Dusk came on, and our camp was built about a hundred yards from the settlement. In the dark, men stole away and raided the steaders for food. Later, I heard screaming, left my pavilion, and saw a great bonfire burning a few lanes away. In the glare of it, one of the village girls was being enthusiastically raped. I did not know how they got hold of her, or why she in particular was so afraid, for I remembered the girls who had danced with the lizard by the Water.

  Looking aside at Vazkor’s pavilion, I saw him standing there among his guards, watching a moment, curious as I had been at the noise. He was masked but there was something strange about him. Only for an instant. Bored, he withdrew almost at once. I am not sure why I turned and walked immediately toward the bonfire—anger at him, perhaps, or because it was a woman they were hurting. Certainly I felt nothing for her as a living creature.

  “Stop this,” I said when I was near enough.

  Men turned and stared, guiltily. One, on top of her still, either had not heard, or was too far gone to care. Her screams had stopped. I leaned over the bucking rapist, got his shoulder, and hauled him off her. As he came up, helpless in my grip, the semen was already spurting from him. I struck
him across his unmasked face several times. He came out of the paroxysm staggering, glassy-eyed, bemused and furious. There was nothing special to his face, only ignorance and bestiality and anger. I do not think he knew who I was. Perhaps no one had told him the goddess rode as a man now. He drew his long-knife and aimed at me, panting and ridiculous, the apparatus of his sex flopping lethargically in front of him. Men yelled at him to come to his senses, and hissed my name as a warning. A drunken string of curses came from his mouth. He lunged at me, but he was a fool. I stepped aside and caught his leg with mine. He fell heavily. I did not even think to kill him with the Power; there seemed no need. He lay on the ground grunting, and presently was still. I realized finally he had taken his own blade in the guts. The soldiers were cowering. I looked at the girl, but she was dead. I told them to bury her, and returned to my pavilion. It was only an incident of the journey.

  On the fourteenth day we reached Za. Her name is a corruption of an ancient word which means dove. It is her symbol, and I had heard her spoken of as the Dove a few times among the soldiers. Like Ezlann, she was named for her color—the pearl-gray stone from which the rocklands hereabouts are formed and from which she was quarried. She too stood high, not on a cliff but on a man-made stone platform, raised twenty feet from the surrounding area. A beautiful city, full of toys, and birds which had found a refuge here from the desert, and nested on her roofs and steeples and towers.

  We entered the gates at evening, and rode for an hour or more through wide roads lined by shouting crowds, and even above this noise the birds of Za, circling and circling overhead, which was their ritual before sleep, made an incredible storm of twittering. The palace of the Javhovor of Za stood in a great circular square, a terraced tower with innumerable turrets, and ornamental work that looked like the decorations added to a cake. Facing the palace, a solitary finger tower, with a mechanized clock to strike out the hours of the day and night. At each striking—an appalling clangor from a brazen gong—ten fantastic figures of gilded iron and enamel in the shapes of maidens, monsters, and warriors progressed around the crown of the tower. It was a masterpiece of unique torture, clanging through my time at Za like a pretty and irritating child which grows worse and worse until tired out, its peak achieved at midnight—the twenty-fourth hour of the day, when the twenty-four pealing hammer blows of triumphant precision roused every soul from sleep or thought like the trumpet of Doom.