I felt there was an understanding between us, or rather that he understood more of me than I did myself. I was still afraid of what I had done.
But those days were full for the first time since I had come from the guts of the mountain. For I took my guard and
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made them teach me something of their skill with knives and bows, and on the backs of the wild brown horses they caught in the woods and then let go after an hour or so of bruising sport. This was a good time. I could push all doubt and alarm from my mind, and think only of my moving hands and feet, and if my eye could judge far enough. The three were very pleased with me, and proud. If they were in a woman’s power-and they were, though it was too early yet for them to own it to themselves-best it should be a woman who could fight and leap and run as well as they.
I learned quickly, and I was sharp and good. The skills were there in me, in my dreams and recollections. Among the marble courts where the lizards lay now, women and men had not been separate races as they were in this world around me. Although I was far smaller and slighter even than little Kel, yet I could swing an iron long-knife as well as Maggur, and what he could break, I could bend. And I rode the wild horses long after Maggur, with his extra weight to hold him, was flung off. I was Darak then, and a crowd would come and cheer, and Maggur would walk by my side after it, grinning, and Kel would sing.
Strange, strange, they called me Imma for their peace of mind, and for that same peace, they thought of me as a prince and a man.
And then came the night of the fifth day, and I lay in my own tent-a piece of hide Maggur had constructed for meand heard an angry grunt and a shout of abuse outside. I opened the tent flap and saw Maggur and Darak glaring at each other in the starlight. I had not realized till now that Maggur and Kel and Giltt took turns to guard my sleeping place.
“Goddess, tell this oaf to get out of my way before I gut him like a fish,” Darak snarled.
Maggur seemed to recollect himself. He stepped aside and grumbled something.
“Maggur thought you were the man who came earlier andtried to take his woman,” I said, the lie sweet on my tongue, for I had seen how much Maggur was mine, and it was a safeness, for all my doubts.
Darak swore, and strode by the bandit, by me, into my tent.
I nodded to Maggur, and went in too, letting the flap fall shut.
There was room under the hide for me, but not much for
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Darak. He crouched down, and when I sat facing him, he said: “The last time I did this, you used a rock on me.”
My heart, which always roused like a dog when he was near me, began to throb harder. I remembered him lying in the cindery shale, his eyes shut and his face defenseless, and how I had run from him. So slowly.
“Tomorrow,” he said, looking into my eyes, “we ride down to the River Road. That is the way the caravan goes to Ankurum.”
“Ankurum?” I said. The name seemed at once alien and familiar.
“Across the Plains, in the Low of the Mountain Ring. A great trade center, one of many where the old cities beyond the Mountains and the Water shop for their war gear. I won’t tell you all of it, but the caravan is mine. Or will be. You’ll ride with us.”
“Why? Your women were left at home I thought.” “Women. You’re a goddess, remember. I’ve heard what the black man has taught you in five days. The rest 111 teach you.”
His eyes were glittering in the dark tent. There was hardly any light from the little brazier of smoky coals, yet I seemed to see him very clearly. Our eyes met hard and fastened together. The cool night was burning. The sound of insects in the grass sounded whirring and brittle in the fiery crystal silence.
“That’s all.” Darak said. His voice was soft and slightly slurred. He did not move.
I thought of the day he had come to the temple, the -Crashing screen, the day when I had taken Shullatt’s jade. I thought of night among the burned woods by the lake, of the first nieht at the ravine when he had gone to the tall dark girl with her cloudy hair. I thought of dawn by the streams when he had said to me: “Besides, goddess, the gods accept only necessities. What they really want, thev take without asking.” And I had known inside me what he had said, and been unable to know it with my mind. Had all this been between us from the beginning, then, delay pointless and unnecessary? “No, Darak,” I said, “that is not all.” His teeth showed, not in a smile, and his hands caught my shoulders very hard, gathered the golden shirt in fistfuls, and ripped it open and away. He pulled me near him, and his mouth was on my breasts, but I said: “Do you have new clothes for me, Darak, if you tear all these?”
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“Yes,” he muttered. He touched the mask briefly. “I’ll leave you that but nothing else.”
He pulled the boots and leggings off, the tunic, the belt, all of it. The belt buckle clashed against the brazier. His own clothes went next with more noise. I thought Maggur might come running in anger, but soon everything was silent except for the insects and the sounds of our own breathing.
He was impatient, but I made him be still a little while. I wanted to touch his body-lean-muscled as a lion’s, bronze and gold, the skin incredibly smooth over the hardness under it, except where fights had scarred it. Love of this body, which had made me so weak in everything before, had stiffened every part of me now, as it had stiffened him. My fingers brushed and cupped the burning phallus, and he pushed me back, his hands crueler and more sure than mine.
And then the breath went hissing out of him. His body grew cooler against me. I held him fast.
“No,” I said. “Do you expect your goddesses to be made as other women?”
A sort of shudder went through him, and a kind of laugh.
“You have what’s necessary for this at least,” he said.
And there was no more talk.
The insects continued their noises in the dark as if they had never stopped, though we had stopped them for a while, and all things but ourselves.
“What are you?” he said suddenly.
He lay over me, his face against my hair.
“I have no more reason to know than you, Darak.”
But when his voice went on, he had only heard me with his ears, not in his thoughts.
“Woman but not woman. Yet more woman than any other breed. And yet a different woman from women. Goddessyes, perhaps I believed it. And then, riding from Makkatt, I saw the red cloud on the mountain by night, and I came to ask you in the tent if you knew-and I saw Krill spitting the snake poison out, while you sat there so prim and stiff. And you were no goddess. And then Makkatt burst open again, and finished them. But you-” He stopped. It was so dark now, I felt him lift and lean over me but did not see. He touched my thighs, my belly, my breasts. “You’ve never done this before, and how I know it’s a mystery for there was nothing a man had to break. Virgin, and yet knowing. What are you?” His hand slid across my throat, my hair to the rolled back folds of the mask.
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“No,” I said. “Darak, you took all else, but you said you would leave me that.”
His hands left me, and his body left me. He stood a little way up in the low tent, and dressed.
“Darak,” I said, but he did not answer me. He went out into the dark, and it might never have been, that first time.
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I sensed Karrakaz near me in my sleep, and strove to wake, and could not. Through the oval door I looked at the flickering color in the stone basin of the altar, and it drew me, sucked me in-only the green coolness could save meand I did not know where it was. My hands went to the bandit jade around my neck, but in this place it was black and dull and useless as iron.
A great hand took my shoulder, and shook me out of the nightmare.