“No,” he said, though his voice seemed distant and almost meaningless. He had picked me up, but, numbed, deafened, blinded, in an incredible extremity of terror, I could not follow what happened to me, or where he took me, and at last the horrible darkness swept in like the hungry sea, and drowned me, and bore me away into itself, and I was lost.
4
Birth is pain. All emotions of sorrow, fear, and anguish begin in that struggle and rejection. After birth the world is abstract, senseless, yet peculiarly orderly. Nothing is logical, therefore illogicality is rational and sane. Suck, sleep, silences and sounds fill and refill a distorted plane where colors slide on the unfocused eyes. There is no time, yet time passes.
Out of the cloudiness things grew, and took on meaning. White swans moving across glittering water, stretching out their looping necks to be fed. A woman with long pale hair, who led me by the hand through ornate gardens leading to the sea, over the floors of incredible rooms where elegant men and women sat. Sometimes there would be others, large, uncouth, staring, dirty, their bodies brown and scarred. They made me afraid, for they were not like us. Like savage, ugly animals, they haunted the walks, their figures contorted to dig at the beds of flowers. Our slaves.
I must not speak to them, but I did, one, a man slave, axing down a slender tree. I asked him why he did it.
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“The tree is diseased, princess,” he said, in the awkward grumble with which they stumbled out our tongue. Then he stared down at me from his great height. His face was hideous, distorted by a pain I could not understand, for he was smiling. “All diseased things,” he said, “must be cut down. And burned.” His eyes ate their way into mine. Frightened, I backed from him, and in that moment the prince who was my father came. The slave’s face altered to a look of moronic terror. The prince picked me up with one arm. With the other he summoned the four guards who came behind him. Two seized the man and brought him down on his face. Another stripped his shirt. A fourth stood ready, a metal edged whip dripping from his hands.
“Now kill him,” said my father, stroking my hair. “But slowly. My royal daughter must see what happens to all those who dare insult us.”
The whip rose and fell monotonously. The man screamed and flopped and blood wriggled in the grass like snakes. I was glad at first, but soon I grew bored. I looked at my father’s soldiers, and they too were slaves, though, better treated and better clothed, they looked very different. It did not seem to matter to them that they whipped one of their own kind.
Soon the man died, and my father took me away.
Three years and many days of lily-lakes, marble-pillared rooms, entertainments of death and beauty. Then fear came. At first fear was only a transparent shadow thrown in the distance, a whisper, something hidden behind layers of thought and activity. Then fear grew deeper and closer, and lay inside the mouth, ready to be hinted at and half-spoken.
To begin with, I did not know the fear, only sensed it. I heard the word “plague” and it meant nothing to me. I heard of death, but that I rejected totally. We would live almost forever. Nothing could harm us. We were not slaves to die from sickness or a wound.
But then, a scarlet dawn, and my mother’s sister screaming and screaming, running through the palace walks naked, her pale hair flaming behind her, an insanity of whiteness against the blood-red sky. Her lover was dead of the Plague, had died lying across her. She had woken to find him, his flesh decomposing against hers. I did not know what was done, but, as the days passed, I came to know, for others died. A pyre was built beyond the lake, and here what remained of them, and of their clothes, was burned. If the corpse was discovered quickly enough, slaves could be sent in to make a cast
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of the body, and this would be painted and decked in jewels and buried in the owner’s tomb in place of their flesh. But often it was too late for that; the body would already be putrescent. And this was why the Plague was so damaging to us, for nothing would remain to heal itself, not flesh or sinew or any organ, not the brain, not even the bones. True annihilation had come among us at last.
There were no symptoms of the Plague in its victims before they succumbed to the coma, therefore, no warning. And the infection spread like rottenness.
My mother died. I could not understand why she should leave me. I was terrified, and wept with terror, not sorrow, as I walked behind her jeweled bier-empty, for she had been too quick for them. I stared at the painted pictures of her tomb deep in the vaults of the palace. The sleeping woman-shape under the mountain with its sky cloud, which was the symbol of birth and of the planet which supported it; the woman with her guard, and rods of office, a symbol of her temporal power; the woman holding the knife toward herself, symbol of her final acceptance of death. I hated these terrible paintings-the same in every tomb, save that in a man’s sepulcher a drawn man would replace the woman in them. I hated the traditional jade set in at the face, as though death had made my mother faceless.
My father came to me at dusk. The low lamplight picked out the small luminous triangle of green above and between his eyes, as he leaned toward my bed.
“Tomorrow you must be up early,” he said. “We are going on a journey.”
“Where?”
“To a place, a place underground, a temple. We shall be safe there.”
The summer too was dead, and rains and winds blew across the land as we traveled from the northern shore. Drifts of bronze leaves stagnated on the rivers and the lakes.
Members of other great houses came with us. The slaves drove our wagons, put up our tents at night, and saw to our needs much as they had done in our palaces. None of them took the Plague, nor did they seem to fear it. Only one man tried to run away. From my wagon flap I watched him blunder on spindly legs across the harvested fields of some village. One of the princes turned and looked hard at the running man. The man fell immediately, and did not rise. The power to kill had not come to me yet, nor the power to levitate my
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body from the ground. The slaves watched in terror any of us who did this; in their own abominable tongue they called us the Winged Ones, imagining we must have invisible wings, and that we flew.
A princess died on the fifth day of our journey. And, at a little mud-brick town they called Sirrainis, my father’s almost whole body was burned on the branches of forest trees.
My mother’s sister, who still lived, became my formal guardian, though she was frowned on for she had taken one of the human guard for her lover. To me he seemed as disgusting and as ugly as the rest, though he pleased her well enough.
Two days later we reached the mountain under which the temple lay. I did not fully comprehend the notion of gods, but that my people had occasionally worshiped them had always been vaguely apparent to me. The great offering cups of the palace, holding always their undying flame, were the symbol of prayers unspoken. As in the tomb paintings, the mountain was the sign of the earth which had bred our might. It had seemed fitting to them, therefore, to hollow out their holy places under mountains, or rather to have them hollowed out by the slaves.
It was a black frowning height, which seemed to offer no comfort. Beyond the massive doors, dimly lit corridors and stairs had been chipped from the dark rock. White-robed men in golden masks chanted in a cavern about a huge rough-hewn stone bowl, fountaining flame. Dismal, cold, unwholesome place. I cried myself to sleep in my little rock cell, as I would cry myself to sleep for half a year.
In the first months there were few deaths from the Plague. Those few were consigned to a blazing crater higher in the mountain, reached by a narrow stair above the cavern. This crater, the white-robed men told us, was all that remained of the volcano it had once been. They were priests, these men, though they had not been so for long, perhaps. They gave an impression of impermanence, and stumbled sometimes over their chanting. They were of our race, and walked like the princes.