Finally he stood up, and hit some man across the face. This must have been an insult aeainst Darak himself. While the bandit sprawled, Darak turned, and began to walk toward my lonely pitched tent on the rock. I could almost have laughed then, seeing him go in, then come out again, and wave his arms furiously, and men go running in every direction across the ravine to search me out. But my heart began to drum, for he came toward the fall and began to climb the rocky slope as if he knew instinctively where I must be.
Watching him climb, so remote and far from me at first, but growing nearer, larger, more real and dominant, I felt as if I called him to me, and could not help myself. He paused at the pool below, looked around, then up. He did not see me. He frowned, and came on again.
I sat down by the leaning stones, and put one hand on them, for the cruel warmth of dav was rising, and they were cool still, and hard and secure. I trembled, and my heartbeat stabbed in me, and I wished it were from fear.
I heard his footsteps on the stones, once through water. Twice he stopped, then moved on once more.
Then he had turned the path, and he stood in front of me, against the curdling sky of sunrise. He was dark against that light, but I could just make out his face.
He looked at me and said harshly: “Of course. Where else could you be?”
He moved along the edge of the little streams, but did not cross.
“You find comfort here, do you?” he said.
There was something in his voice and look that part of me cowered away from. I said nothing. I seemed to be drowning in his presence, but there was no help for it.
“They say”-he jerked his thumb toward the ravine-“you
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killed some girl because she had my child. Brought on a miscarriage with a potion, then drugged her and let her die.”
There seemed no point in speaking, but obviously he expected an answer.
“No,” I said.
“No,” he repeated, ”of course ‘No.’ Why should you do it? Shullatt speaks about you as if you were a woman, with a woman’s emotions and spitefulness, but you’re as cool as river clay. There may be wickedness in you, but not a thing as ordinary as jealousy. Besides, goddess, the gods accept only necessities. What they really want, they take without asking.”
I felt the need to grasp at this sentence, cynical, yet deeper than he meant it to be. There was no time.
“Why I brought you here I don’t fully understand. There’s a sickness with the sheep and the cattle, and this apparently is your doing too. They’ll not be happy till you’re gone.”
“Then I will go,” I said.
“Oh, no, it’s not so easy, goddess. You know our stronghold. When I say gone, I mean gone underground with an arrow through vou, or your neck broken. Of course,” he added, “if I cut off your tongue and fingers-”
“No!” a shrill voice shouted. “Kill her! Your men want her dead, too, Darak.”
Beyond Darak stood a woman’s silhouette that spoke with Shullatt’s voice.
Darak half turned.
“Who asked you to follow me, Shullatt? I didn’t.”
“I knew she’d be here-the place with the Stones-and I knew you wouldn’t do what we asked-kill and burn her, and rid us of the filthy curse she brought.”
I stood up and blood tingled through me. I must die and burn, because this bitch demanded it. I crossed through the water, and she darted at me suddenly with a knife in her hand. It was her swift moment this time. The blade slit my shoulder, and blood spilled fast as wine into the stream, turning the lavender flowers purple, the red flowers scarlet. I got her throat in my hands, my knee against her side. Fool, she might have thrust me off a thousand ways, but she stabbed again, into my arm, and with the impetus of pain, I thrust her body one way, her head another, and snapped her neck.
It was too quick to think: This is Death I am giving! The impulse came from the depth of me, irresistible.
She lay in the flowers, and my blood dripped on her face.
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“You never fight like a woman,”I heard Darak say. “She’d have done well to remember that.”
I felt sick, but I said: “She is taller than me, and weighs more, but fire is a great leveler. Take her body down a little way, then burn it. Show them what is left, and I will go my own way. Do not fear I will betray this place. I have nothing to gain in doing so.”
“You,” he said.
His hand came onto my shoulder. He turned me to face him, and his eyes looked in at mine through the mask-holes of the shireen.
“I can’t see you,” he said. “What are you feeling, now that you’ve killed? Nothing?”
His hand slipped downward from my shoulder onto my left breast, and the heart under it leaned and leaped as if it would burst free of me. to lie against his palm. Then his hand slid “wav. His face was tight and concentrated.
“Listen to me,” he said. “I’ll take her down to the pool. There’s a place near there we use for it. I’ll burn her. And show them. But you’ll stay here. If they catch you on the track they’ll pull you down like a wolf pack. Don’t worry that they’ll come for you here.” He pointed toward the leaning stones across the stream. “That place,” he said casually, “an altar of sacrifice-old as the ravine itself. I’ve heard them say some black god or other still broods here, but that’s tales for children. Good luck for you, you picked this place. Or perhaps you heard them talking.”
“Then I wait here. What then?”
“Tonight we ride south. You’ll come with us.”
“And you will let me free when we are away from here?”
He picked Shullatt up. Her disjointed head joggled over his shoulder. He grinned at me, a grin hard and white as the teeth it showed.
“No. I’ll not let you free, goddess-woman who fights like a man.”
He swung away, and down the path, and was gone.
I waited. The day was red as blood, or so it seemed to me as I lay in the flowers beside the streams, the scarlet bells brushing my eyelids. I was afraid now, aware that I had killed, and did not care much. He blunted all the edges of my guilt, but I felt guilt at lack of guilt. Karrakaz, and already evil was upon me. I thought, Run down among the tents and
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they will kill you, and end all this. The clouds above me formed the shape of the Knife of Easy Dying.
But I was alive as I waited for him.
I did not even smell the srnoke, nor hear them come to see the burning thing, though they came. They came.
He touched my shoulder, and I started back across the sparkling darkness. I had slept, I thought, but he looked at me strangely. Had Darak, too, seen me stiff and still and umbreathing? It was cool, and twilight.
“Get up,” he said, “and put these on.”
A heap of clothes lay by me on the grass-man’s clothes, but small enough that they would fit me.
I turned my back to strip-because it was before him I would be naked.
“Where did you find these things?”
“A boy’s,” he said.
The boots were hard on my thighs, the leather belt cut my waist. He must have been a small-footed boy, with a girl’s waist too-the belt holes ran far around the band. Perhaps Darak had let women ride with him before. Still, there was no doubting this was a man’s gear-the peculiar sheaths with their cargo of spiked knives, the groin-guard under the tunic flap.
“Roll back the shirt a minute,” he said abruptly. “I brought a salve for the cuts Shullatt gave you.”
“No need,” I said.
Impatient at this presumed modesty, he came over and roughly pulled the shirt free of shoulder, upper arm, and breast. It was darkening; I could not see his face. But his breath was sucked in hard. He touched the mauve scars with nervous fingers, as if my flesh were too hot, and might burn him.
“You heal quickly,” he said.
His fingers brushed the jade.
“When you’re ready,” he said, “we’ll go down.”
“Wait,” I said. “How many men are with you? If they see me, they will know me.”
“Most of these men come from another place. The ravine men that ride with us set no store by you or your spells. It was the women’s doing, that anger, and they’ve had their sacrifice. They’ll think it’s Shullatt that’s gone with me.”