by Tanith Lee
I wandered most of the day about the gut of the mountain, straying into forbidden rooms where the priests’ robes hung, up great flights of stairs, into dark places which frightened me.
Chief among the priests was the prince called Sekish. I feared and hated him. He wore a scarlet robe, and, while many of our people were very fair, Sekish was dark-skinned and black-haired. Tall and gaunt, his shadow fell black across me as he stood before my mother’s sister and berated her for her human lover.
“You choose beneath you,” he snarled. “You bring the anger of the Powerful Ones upon us all.”
“You are what I should choose, perhaps, Sekish?” she said, and I cowered for her. But he straightened, the green triangle above and between his eyes glinting like the third eye of his contempt. He turned and left her, and three days later he pronounced a ban on slaves. Either they left the mountain, or they would be killed. They went gladly, her lover among them. He was her talisman against death, it seemed to me, and, after four months of hope, she was the first new victim of the Plague.
Within a space of seven days, ten more were dead. Hysteria broke out within the mountain, and Sekish, the Dark One, walked among us, boring into our souls with his narrow black eyes, telling us to pray, to repent, to acknowledge our wickedness, and the evil which we had created, and which had returned to destroy us.
From morning to night now the chants of self-abasement before the stone bowl. The fine clothing, the jewelry, were put away. Men and women walked with their hair loose about them, in plain shifts and tunics, beating at themselves with rods until blood ran, beating again as soon as the swiftly healing wounds had closed. Everywhere the sound of terror, frenzied contrition, despair, as the lords of men groveled on their knees.
“Karrakaz,” I whispered before the flame in the bowl, my body stiff and aching, “I am the evil on the earth’s face, I am the blight, the diseased thing, the filthy, the accursed.”
Around me others whispered as I did. Clouds of whispering rose like steam. I thought of the statue of my father in the hall of his palace, the glossy stuff of which it was made, how I had laughed to see both him and it stand side by side, two identical men, short-bearded, long-haired. Now the statue would be all that was left of him. I began to cry. I buried my face in my hands, forgetting my chant of self-sin, until the black cold shadow of Sekish lay dank on me.
“Yes, child, weep,” he cried out in his terrible voice. “Weep for your maggot birth, and the foulness which is in you, the foulness which your mother and father allowed to grow from their lusts.” He leaned closer and seized my arm. Around us the chanting faltered and ceased. “But you do not weep for that, I see. It is a rebellious child, daring to dream of its damned past. This child may bring Their wrath on us.” Eyes stared at me. He dragged me nearer to the huge stone bowl, and the flame slashed his face with color. He held me facing that fire, and leaning close, he hissed into my ear: “You are filthy, you are evil, the spawn of evil, the womb of evil. The Power in you is corrupt, horrible. The full Power—pray, pray never to attain it! Hubris, wickedness, ugliness, evil. You are the dirt of the dark places, dung of monsters in the pit of lust. Speak it. Speak it.”
In terror. I limped after him.
“I am filthy . . . evil . . . Power is corrupt, horrible . . . I will pray never to attain it!”
Over and over again the ghastly words were spewed as he held me before the flame in his iron hands. I repented that I had thought of my father. I did not understand, but I learned. I became degraded and filthy. I shriveled and twisted and was damned.
When he let me down, I ran to my cell and curled myself together, hiding my face and as much of my body as I could from any awareness in the room. I felt the watching eyes of gods upon me, judging and condemning. Could I doubt that I would die also now, my flesh dripping from my bones in the dark?
Yet I woke to my misery with the new day. Sekish lay before the stone bowl, what there remained of him.
After Sekish there was no other leader. Yet we did not need one, our own guilt and fear was leader enough.
In that last month, death stripped us, until only a handful remained, eight or nine princes and princesses of the great houses of the north, and a handful of priests. If any lived outside our shelter, we had no word, neither any hope of it. The earth had snatched her gifts from us, given herself back to the human savages who had once possessed her.
And then the thunder came which set the final seal on our darkness. Deep within itself the sleeping mountain had stirred and trembled. Upper galleries of the temple had fallen, leaving in their wake staircases which now led nowhere, their platforms shorn away, rooms hollowed out by collapsing rocks. Where it finally settled, the debris had blocked the great air funnels built into the mountain. Now the air that meant life and food to us could no longer enter, and the air which remained grew stale and poisonous.
One by one they fell into the sleep of suffocation, and one by one, as they lay in their rooms like pale embalmed dolls with stopped clockwork hearts, the Plague came and melted them into wax.
I wandered the silent temple slowly, panting, and sobbing when I had enough breath for it. I watched them die. There are no words for the emotions in me as I lingered, waiting to follow them to their disgusting end.
There was a princess, and she remained whole longer than the rest. She lay in her trance, her white hair spread around her, her straight white limbs bright under the thin robe. Between her breasts glistened a drop of diamond—the gift of some long-dead lover—which she had not taken off even in her agonies of repentance. Each day I would drag myself to her cell, and sit by her on the floor, holding her limp hand as if this were a protection and a comfort.
One day I came and the white lamp of her skin was spilled into a reeking stain on the couch.
I went back to my little cell. I curled myself together. For the last time I cried myself to sleep.
5
To wake, and not to know where or who you are, not even to know what you are—whether a thing with legs and arms, or a beast, or a brain in the hull of a great fish—that is a strange awakening. But after a while there was a new darkness, full of a pattern of light. I was afraid. I struggled to release myself from the bands which seemed to hold me, tried to cry out, and even my body and my voice were new to me.
Then came an avalanche of color, sound, movement, cascading across my mind, drenching it and leaving it bruised. The rest of my life had passed swiftly, as if someone had flicked over the pages of a huge book, too fast. Yet I could remember now that this was not that first awakening under the mountain, that first awakening as a woman, who had fallen asleep as a four-year-old child.
Around me the throb of hidden engines in the silver star-ship.
Hands drew a metal circlet from my head, and metal bracelets from my wrists. I rose from the metal chair, and I was free.
I looked at Ciorden, where he still sat slowly drawing the metal bands from himself. His face was clenched and pale. He glanced at me and smiled a little.
“A tiring journey,” he said, “for both of us.”
I nodded. I was quiet and empty. Feeling the stir of understanding. I seemed to have no need to scrabble toward it. It would come.
A doorway slid open in the far wall; beyond lay a small, dimly lit room. Rarm’s tall figure intercepted the light. He beckoned to me, and I went into the room without trepidation. He followed me, and the doors softly shut.
There was a silence between us. Finally I said: “Strange to recall the experience of birth. The first struggle which we all forget.”
“Your birth,” he said, “is unimportant. Have you unearthed your own secret?”
“Yes, I believe so.”
“Then tell me,” he said.
“It seems laughable,” I said, still not wanting to say the thing aloud.
“As important as finding it is the need for you to a
dmit it,” he said. “Now tell me, as you see it, what has happened to you.”
I sat on a couch which came to me from the wall. I looked at my own hands, calm, white, slightly open in my lap.
“Darak, Vazkor, and you, Rarm Zavid, I can see that much,” I said softly. “You bear only a superficial resemblance to each other; there is none of the great likeness I have imagined linked each of you to the last. I see also whose likeness began my obsession with the tall dark narrow-eyed man—Sekish, whose face came in my first dreams after I had left the mountain. Sekish, who terrified and degraded me, who made me aware of my evil and unworthiness to live. I see, too, why I blocked my thoughts against the four years of my past, and particularly against the last half-year of death and misery. Except that I remembered, Rarm, far too well—without remembering.”
“You were strong,” he said. “By some miracle you escaped the Plague, and grew into a woman as you lay in the airless cell for sixteen years. The airless cell. Unbreathing, you could only lie in a coma. Do you know now what woke you?”
“I think—I am not sure.”
“In the last days of the Plague,” he said, “the volcano roused itself; rock fell and blocked the air funnels. For the sixteen years of your coma the volcano grumbled and trembled, preparing itself for an eruption. On the last day, the walls of the mountain cracked open under the pressure of built-up gases inside. Through the cracks, a little new air filtered in to you. You began to breathe. After a time, in the last hours before the eruption, you woke.”
“And so,” I said, “and so my waking did not create the eruption as part of the curse and punishment I must suffer for going out of the mountain. It was the eruption which caused my waking.”
“Your curse and punishment,” he repeated. “Yet you understand now, don’t you, who cursed you and who punished you? You understand finally the nature of Karrakaz?”
“Karrakaz was my invention. I invested the offering bowls of the Lost with the Power of my self-terror. There has never been an Evil One, a Soulless One, created from the wickedness of my people, returning to destroy them. I feared my Power, because Sekish had made me fear it, and I strove with every ounce of my unconscious will to prevent myself achieving it.”
“And that,” he said, “was the ridiculous irony behind everything that has happened to you. Because you woke with Power, with your full Power. The voice which you imagined spoke out of the offering bowl told you that you could never repossess your greatness until you found your soul-kin of green jade—the quest, the hopeless quest. If you had continued to believe and follow that instruction, you need never have discovered your own strength: the demands of Sekish would have been obeyed. So you fought yourself. Despite your obvious gifts—your ability to understand any manner of speech by a form of telepathy, your ability to cure the most terminal diseases—you made excuses for your achievements—the crowd healed itself—and dreamed of the Jade you could never find. Darak came, and you buried yourself alive in his way of living, regretting your lost quest, but unable to break free. In the ravine camp you went to the leaning stones because you sensed their aura, the evil feel to them because of the superstitions of the bandits. It fitted ideally into the picture you had built of yourself. On the South Road, empathy, another part of your Power, asserted itself. You saw things that had happened there in the past, you saw the Lost, but you saw through the eyes of their human slaves, to such an extent that you, also, confused levitation with flight. And then, Kee-ool. You had threatened yourself with lightning at the Road Gate, but the ruin still drew you.”
He paused, prompting me with his silence.
I said dutifully, “I was repelled and attracted at the same time, as I have been repelled by and attracted to all places I could invest with the character of Karrakaz. I wanted to destroy myself, and at the same time, suffocated by Darak’s personality, I also longed to link with my own self—the severed part of me which I had made a demon.”
“Hence the bargain with Karrakaz,” he said, “and then your attempt to kill Darak with the falling stone, when he shook you out of your trance.”
“And the earth tremor, the flying stones that killed Kel and so many other men—was I the cause of that?”
“Yes. With the Power in you that you didn’t even understand you had. You raised the storm to destroy Darak and the life you had with him, to destroy yourself if you could.”
“But I was afraid,” I said.
“You had a death-wish and a wish to live,” he said. “That’s common to all men. Unfortunately you had the power to organize both.”
“And Darak’s death in Ankurum. Did I make it happen?”
“I don’t think so,” he said, and I wanted to believe him. “You were convinced there was a curse on you, that there could be no happiness for you or for anyone you loved. That conviction communicated itself both to Darak and Vazkor, but not directly through you, because you never spoke to them of it.”
But I recalled how I had said to Darak, “To see my face is death to you.”
I wanted to believe him. I thrust the memory of Darak away, and the memory of Asutoo, the warrior I had hypnotized and murdered for revenge.
“The Mountain Ring,” I said, “and Uasti. My mental strength grew because of her. I thought she was teaching me new things, instead of releasing abilities I already possessed.”
“Uasti was a good teacher,” he said. “She made you look a little way into yourself, see what you could become. She might have taught you restraint, if she’d lived.”
“But she died. I ruled the wagoners, and crossed the Water. I was killed, and healed, and lived, and reached Ezlann. And Vazkor.”
“Vazkor,” Rarm said. “One of your worst teachers. In order to match him, you grew like him. You achieved the hubris Sekish had made you fear for yourself. And even before Ezlann, you killed the wagoners on the road.”
“I have always thought,” I said, “their death was my worst crime, even out of all the crimes and cruelties I committed.”
“Don’t judge yourself,” he said. “None of us are ever good at it. I think, at that time, to yourself you were already a goddess. Before, you had always thought you could die, yet you rose from the grave—only gods do that. In the City you unconsciously exerted influence to draw three guards to you—as you had unwittingly done in the bandits’ camp.”
“Because part of me recalled the three guards in the tomb paintings, the symbol of Temporal Power. As I recalled the symbolic knife, and thought it could kill me.”
“Exactly,” he said.
“In Ezlann and the Cities, the flame I called Karrakaz was still. It never troubled me. And in Belhannor, to raise the storm, I made a union with the flame—”
“In the first place, the flame left you alone because you were finally too strong—too strong even for the self-terror Sekish had given you. You’d faced yourself, you had said: ‘I am everything I was afraid to be. There’s no help for what I am. I can do nothing about it. Therefore I shall enjoy and reap benefit from my superior status, and crush the ants under my heel.’ In Belhannor there was no link—you simply drew on the extra reserves of Power now open to you without their self-inflicted barriers. You were Uastis, the Risen One, the goddess of White Desert. And finally you set your strength against Vazkor—in contempt, because he had no right to share your hubris.”
“I killed him,” I whispered to my white, half-opened hands.
“You killed him,” Rarm repeated. “And then you lay down to die under the tower.”
“And when the tribe found me my Power was gone. I could not even understand their tongue, let alone kill their seer.”
“Which was your final punishment against yourself. You had seen yourself achieve Power. You had fulfilled Sekish’s assessment of you. So now you blocked your Powers totally, and let the cruelty of the tribe complete your chastisement. You suffered, but you needed and wanted to
suffer. When you were treated as a useless woman, a fool and a slave, it was the action of the princes, and princesses under the mountain, beating themselves into miserable humility. You left your child as much because it would hurt you, as because it was expedient. And finally you became an animal in the marshes, shut off from all rational contact with man.”
“Until the black tribe took me in,” I said.
“And the striving began again,” Rarm said. “The peace, and then the Book—one of those diaries of repentance you were given as a child—recalled your quest for the Jade. You went to the ruined cities on the shore, and there you found Karrakaz, as you knew you would, because part of your mind recognized the structure of a tomb, and where the offering cup would be.”
“I tried to destroy myself completely,” I said. “A sleep of death I had willed on myself. It was not a demon I fought, only myself. Yet, so terrible. So real to me. No surprise now that Fethlin was able to save me. The Power was directed only at me—until we reached the valley. Did I cause the earthquake there as at Kee-ool?”
“Yes. You’ve always been able to harness great elemental forces for your own suppression.”
“The dream,” I said, “the dark deserted city, and the red fire on the tongue of land in the bay. A pyre,” I said. “The Plague had come for them too. And then the lizard. And then, on the beach, the shadow of the ship, and the beam of light—”
“You brought us down,” he said, “and you used the computer to kill the lizard. One of your few actions of self-preservation.”
“Why?”
“Perhaps,” he said, smiling, “perhaps in some way you knew all this would follow. You have, after all, the gift of foreknowledge also.”
There was another little silence between us in the room. He said, “All your Powers have returned now. For example, we’ve communicated all this time with no trouble.”
“The wrist-band,” I said. But when I looked down the green light did not sparkle. I drew it from my wrist. I said, “I understand now, but I am not complete. I have had one year of life since my childhood. But I made certain that when I was reborn, I would be born dead.”