by Tanith Lee
Dusk smothered the reeds, and she cooked a little meal on a fire by our tent. The two girls sat to eat, and again offered the food to me. I shook my head. Huanhad pointed to my shireen, and made a play of averting her eyes. It seemed she thought I could not eat in it. The women of the black krarl went unmasked, though apparently were acquainted with the female taboos of other tribes; Huanhad had not attempted to remove the mask, though she helped me remove my ruined shift. Again I shook my head, and they returned to their eating.
They came early to sleep, but first placed within the door flap three of the grayish cakes and a pitcher of water, exactly like the arrangement I found when I came among them to steal food. That night I was puzzled, but later, as I learned something of their tongue, I discovered that the cakes and water were an offering to their gods, put out freshly by each tent every night, so that any wandering deity might eat and drink if he chanced on the krarl in the darkness. No wonder there had been an outcry when they found an offering gone.
In the morning, before we set out for the river, their chief came to the tent. He managed to tell me about the crossing, and that the tribe was making east, yet not as I had thought to the fertile lands, but toward the sea. His name, he explained, was Qwenex, and he politely expressed the wish that they might name me also. As I was so ignorant of their tongue, a personal name might be essential, perhaps might even save my life if called to me in time of danger, when nothing else would make sense. I indicated that I had no name. He showed no particular surprise. He touched my forehead gently, and said the single word, “Morda.” It was, I found afterward, their name for ivory.
* * *
We spent two days traveling in the willow-green land beyond the river. Little waterways trickled by us, making, as we were, for the sea. In the dusk of the second day, coming from among the trees, I saw a small herd of horses at the stream on the slope below. They were wild, there could be no doubt of that, nor of their beauty; neither were they the mad man-devourers of the Eshkorek valleys. Their long heads dipped and lifted, arched necks turned, and the black oval gems of eyes stared at us. I thought they would leap the stream and run from us in the way of all wild horses, but they made no move to go. We went by them quietly, and they gave way to us. I saw Huanhad reach up her hand, and a black silk head reached downward in turn to brush her shoulder. Their leader nodded to Qwenex as he passed. They seemed neither afraid nor disdainful. Perhaps they sensed that these men at least would not leap high on their backs, choke them and break them, and burn out their strong lungs in the service of human commerce or war. I do not think I imagined that from me they averted their heads, politely and with dignity ignoring my existence.
In three days more the plain had paled and sharpened, giving way to limestone and crops of thorny trees. There was a strange tang in the air, a sea promise I did not yet recognize. What they sought by the salt shores I did not know. They were a quiet people. They neither ignored nor made a companion of me. Perhaps because of this gentleness and this protected solitude, or perhaps merely because it was the time for it, my sorrowing began. I can call it nothing else. I did not weep or tear at myself within. A weight was chained to me. It was not even regret, which is fruitless, nor despair, which has necessarily no reason. It was not terrible or unbearable in any way, although it was pain. It lasted three days and two nights. Not until it was past did the other petty miseries steal in. Then I wept.
On the sixth night I ate with Huanhad by the fire, and a woman came and sat with us, holding her child in her arms. I stared at the child across the fire flicker; it was as old as my child would have been, my child which I had abandoned in Ettook’s krarl, to learn his disgusting ways and thoughts and deeds. Never before had there been any sense of loss. Before, always, it had been Vazkor’s, a piece of him, his will imposed on me. I had been glad, glad to be rid of it. And now I saw it differently, for the first time. It had been also a part of me. And more than that, it had been an individual life, a new, a created thing, that I, by the unique laws of nature, had earned a right to participate in. And I had thrust my right away from me, thrown off the wage, confusing it with the hated labor.
I got up from the fire, and walked slowly away among the spiky thorn trees. I clung to them, and cried bitterly in bewildered distress. Yet all the while a cold voice murmured in my brain, It will pass, fool. It will pass. Not for you, at this time.
I fell asleep among the trees, tasting salt on my lips from my tears and from the sea wind, and when I woke, I think I understood that it was my luxury to weep, not my right or even my need. I thought of the warrior he would become, and how he would protect Tathra as his mother from the jeering tribe. I had done well to leave my child with her. And it was easy to give what I did not want.
Yet as I walked through that day toward the unknown sea, all the ghosts and sins of my life came to me and hammered on me. I rode in the Sirkunix, watched Darak die, swung my sword in Vazkor’s battles, shrank from the scarlet water of his death. White horses screamed under me, men fell in my defense with the faces of Maggur, Kel, Mazlek, Slor.
Huanhad came in the sunset and put her hand gently on my arm. I knew enough now to understand almost all of what she said to me.
“What is your trouble, Morda? You walk by yourself—mutter; is this a fever that you have?”
“Yes,” I said, “that is all it is.”
I went into the tent, and lay staring into the shadows until sleep picked me up, and I flew with burning fire-feathered wings across the black cliffs of my doubt.
Below, a great stretch of water crinkled moonlight. I soared above it, and away to the south, saw a shoreline scattered with broken, bone-white cities. I wheeled toward them, the wing-thrust in my ears like a wind-drum, beating with my heart. Over the black bright rollers of the sea, where the froth burst silver on the faces of the dunes and the bastions of crested rocks like the shattered bodies of dragons, eagles, giants.
But out of the white carcass of the cities a shape rose, a man’s shape—Darak? Vazkor? He beat up toward me on black wings, and he grinned as he held wide his arms—not to embrace me but to keep me out. Nearer and nearer—I could see him well now, the plaits of his black hair, the scars on his sunburned skin, the tribal ornaments, the knife in his belt.
“Your son,” he shouted at me across the air which divided us. “Ettook’s warrior! Do you like what you made of me? I have killed forty men, and I have four wives and thirteen sons, and three days from now I will die with an out-tribe spear between my ribs. I might have been a prince in Eshkorek Arnor or in Ezlann. I might have been a king with a great army at my back, beautiful women to please me, and Power to make all men do as I wished. Do you like what you have made?”
And he drew from his belt a knife, and with one strong beat of the black wings, twisted and threw it. It soared toward me through the darkness.
“This has no ability to kill me,” I said.
But then I saw the knife for what it truly was, or what it had become. The knife from the altar beneath the Mountain—the one blade which could end my life, which Karrakaz had shown me—the Knife of Easy Dying. Its cold tip entered my breast, so sharp I did not feel it. I screamed as it burrowed to the hilt in my flesh.
And found Huanhad’s face and the dawn, instead of death.
2
That day we reached the sea.
Since the marshes, the weather had been strange, drab and dull for summer, yet often very hot. Now, in the afternoon, the skies had a still intense grayness; there was a pre-storm glare on the outlines of the trees. The ground had sloped downward for some while. Rough meadowland stretched away into shadowy valleys. Then ahead, against the gray light, appeared the jutting silhouettes of a cliff range, and beyond that, a faint mauveness like a chalk line on the sky.
Huanhad stopped, pointed, and cried out, “The sea! The sea!”
One or two others joined in her cry, using other words I had not l
earned yet. It was the first time I had seen them in anything resembling excitement. The children skipped and laughed, and the goats bleated crazily. Qwenex lifted his arm and called us on, and the normal rhythmic walking speed increased to a brisk trot. I hurried with them, but why, I did not fully understand. The smudgy line of color meant nothing to me, and after my dream, there was reluctance besides.
After a few minutes, a guttural roar broke open the cloud sheet. Brazen lightning shot across the open land, and rain fell in large heavy drops, warm on our hands and necks, widely spaced at first, gradually joining together, until we moved through a chain mail of tepid water that beat like a drum on our heads. Lightning made rose-pink interludes in the sudden darkness. I could not see where we were going, and had an abrupt conviction that we would all run over some cliff edge, like a herd of pigs driven mad.
But they knew the way too well for that. Huanhad firmly grasped my shoulders and brought me to a halt, and I found they had spread out in a line along the cliff top, about a yard from the drop. So I looked down and saw the sea, stretching out and out from the sheer rock strand, two hundred feet below us. On either side the ghosts of other headlands thrust forward to the water, pale in the streaming rain. Ahead, the boiling caldron, seething, limitless, seeming to curve with the round shape of the world, banded with every color of the changing sky, joined to its last perceptible horizon with a thin green lacquer of spume and a hallucination of violet. True beauty is always oddly surprising.
I understood then that I had known the sea before, as my dream should have warned me. I turned my head slowly southward, looking for that scatter of broken bones on this eastern tip of the land. Rain and cliffs were in the way of my eyes. I sensed nothing southward, only empty land, stone beaches, and the carving chisels of the waves. Yet my Power was gone. How could I know?
Huanhad touched my shoulder softly.
“The sea,” she whispered. “You will be better here, Morda.”
After a time, Qwenex called to them, and they turned away, one by one, as if reluctant to let go of the sight of the sea. Through the rain we trudged, parallel to the brink, though a little farther inland. I stumbled over the white limestone outcroppings. We went in a curve and upward, and suddenly there was a white shape ahead, squat, disheveled, and we had reached a broken tower, open to the rain, and breached in a hundred places. Perhaps it had been a watch or beacon in earlier days. It had something of that tower in the marsh where I had first found their krarl.
Swift as its coming, the rain began to ease. In the last drizzling, they formed a circle around the tower’s base, a few feet from it, and stood quite still, as if waiting. A silence fell in place of the rain. Muddied pink lights quivered over the sky. There was something secret, close, mystic even, in the way they stood around the tower. I drew out of their circle, shivered, and waited also.
Qwenex raised his arm, all one black narrow shape against the pale tumbled ruin. He saluted the tower. And then he moved to one of the broken openings, stooped, and went inside.
A gull screamed furiously, out at sea. There was no other sound.
Qwenex came out of the tower, and in his hands he carried a wooden cask covered with the white powder of the stones that had been laid on top of it. With his knife he prized up the lid. The lid fell off. Inside, a dull glimmer, something—metallic?
He lifted the something out, and it was a great book, covered all over with plated gold. At first, all that stirred in me was the memory of Ezlann, Za, Belhannor, and the books of Asren Javhovor, set with many jewels, glittering and priceless in the candlelight. Qwenex carried the book forward and went around the circle to each of them in turn, and each man, woman, child, touched the book, very lightly, as if it were too hot or cold for them. I remembered then what Uasti, the healer of the wagons, had told me—of the wandering tribe and the golden book that contained legends of the Lost Race. My heart sprang against my ribs. I reached across the circle, and laid my hand full on the surface of the golden book. Qwenex looked at me. He let me touch the holy thing, but he would not let me do more. This much I could see. What had Uasti said? No woman was allowed to look inside it. Yet I felt the inscription, blurred by age and handling, seek my palm like a moving snake. I lifted my hand, and saw the words as I had seen them written in the green dust on the wagon floor.
BETHEZ TE-AM, Herein the Truth.
Then Qwenex was moving away from me, carrying the book to others, waiting motionless and yearning.
I shuddered, and before I could stop myself, I laughed. They did not seem to notice what I did. They, the black peaceful ones from the marshlands, who carried the sin and sorrow of what had created me, who worshiped the annals of hubris and stupidity; the annals that were perhaps the key to what I must know of myself, to my lost Power—even the location of the green comfort, my soul-kin, the Jade.
* * *
A huge vermilion gong rapidly sinking over the inland meadows was the first and last we saw of that day’s sun. Their black tents were up between the sea and the tower, and along the flinty scrubland behind it. Their cook-fires sizzled and popped and hiccuped smutty protests in the wet grass. They went about their ordinary tasks as I had seen them do every evening since I had been with them, yet I had been with them long enough to know that there was a different feel to what they did. The women talked more than usual, the men less. The children ran about and rolled in the meadows, where the goats nibbled and stared around them with bright mad eyes, catching the anticipation that tingled in the air. Some ceremony or feast or rite was to come with the full darkness. Some rejoicing which had to do with the sea, and the ancient book.
The Book. I was obsessed with it. It lay now in Qwenex’s tent, and a circle of warriors stood around the tent, guarding it. It was more tradition than anything, that guard; who of the tribe, after all, would interrupt the Book’s privacy? Yet I could not break through the chain of spears and men. I prowled about the camp, not eating or drinking, going from fire to fire, trying to catch up snatches of their talk and understand them. I learned nothing.
An oval moon pierced through the cloud, and the sea under it burned white from edge to edge. The breakers exploded below us with soft concussions.
Their meal was finished. The women laughed and shook their hair in the dusk. A string of children came running from the goat fields with armfuls of small pale flowers. They tossed them down, and I saw countless garlands lying on the grass. The women bent and put the flowers around their heads, and on the heads of their men. Something in me grew tight and afraid, and I drew back from them along the cliff. I had seen too many ceremonies, obscure, hateful, and empty, to welcome this one. Huanhad came picking her way toward me, a warrior walking a little behind her, both of them garlanded. She held out flowers to me also.
“You are not of us,” she said slowly, so that I should understand, “but you are welcome to be glad with us if you wish.”
My hand stayed stiffly by my side, but I thought of the Book. I reached out and took the flowers, put them on my hair, and thanked her. They turned and went back into the camp, and I followed them.
They had laid a new fire in the meadowland, a little way behind the tower, and now they were forming around the lank red banners of its smoky flames in their repetitive circle, linking hands. A tall boy, fifteen years old, perhaps, began to play on a long narrow pipe made from the tough stem of some reed. A strange thin sound came from the pipe, not in any sense a melody. The circle began to sway one way and then the other. Huanhad, her warrior, and I slid into the circle. Hands disengaged to receive us, clasped again around our own. Caught now in the swaying motion they made, the fire slid before my eyes, the reed-wailing made a jumble of my thoughts and senses. The circle began to flow leftward and around the fire, trotting at first, soon running. I saw the blur of faces beyond the flames. Feet thudded softly over the crackle of damp twigs, the sea-thunder below. Suddenly a man’s voice cried out behind the c
ircle. The chain broke, hands dropped hands, the men, women, and children fell away from the fire, and ran instead, forward, after the boy with the pipe, and Qwenex, who carried in his hands once more the golden Book.
The moon blazed coldly overhead, and against the still-blue sky, I saw the thin ebony lines of the running figures, stringing out like the scattered notes from the pipe, their hair flying under the silver sprinkle of summer flowers.
I did not know where they were going, nor what significance this thing had to them. I followed blindly, without their ecstasy, tearing my way through tall grasses and staggering across sharp stones. A long time seemed to pass, and my breath came short, and hurt under my breast. I was afraid I would lose them—I was already the last, and far behind. Panting, I clambered over white rocks, looked up and saw that they had gone. I stared out along the cliff line, but they were no longer ahead of me. I held my breath and listened for the pipe, but it was silent. They might have vanished off the earth.
And then I thought to look down, over the cliff edge, and I saw the breakers were pounding far out now, leaving a long stretch of open beach. On the beach lay the tribe, like people resting after a hard journey, on their backs, hand touching hand, quite still, describing once more, by some curious intuition of their bodies, that circle which expresses infinity for it has neither beginning nor end. For a moment I thought they had flung themselves down there from the cliff to die, and then, in the center of them, I saw the hub of the wheel, picked out by the moon, which was the Book.