Now the men got up. They went past me uneasily, once outside, laughed and blundered around in some horseplay or other.
“What does the goddess want?”
He was abrupt, uneasy as they.
“To hear your plans. I am tired of knowing only a moment or so before we move.”
“It was a meeting beteen the chief and his people. Not for goddesses,”^
I thought, I can go nowbe free of him. 1 must go, must be free. Already there is blood on me, and will be more unless I go. And he does not want me.
But I said lightly: “The gods must be everywhere, Darak. Next time you will not send them away when I come in.”
He went to the tent flap, threw the lees of the beer across the grass. Coming in, he tied the flap shut, and began to strip ready to sleep. When he did this, it was somehow insulting. Every muscle flick, brazier gleam on his naked torso was a jeer at me. He began to pull off the high boots, slowly, with great care.
“I suppose you’ll stay,” he said.
They have such pride in their sex, these men and women, that there must always be dignity and battle in it. He expected me to untie the tent flap and march out, my back stiff with fury, but it was no matter to me.
“I will stay,” I said.
He stood up and moved quickly over to me. He seized my arm, and his fingers and thumb were like five iron talons in my flesh,
“Did you make the mountain burn?”
It astonished me, this superstition again, festering in him.
“No,” I said.
But I was not sure. The curse had gone out with me from the volcano, so Karrakaz had promised me.
“The villages, all of them. That second time there would be nothing left,” he said.
I touched his face with my free hand.
Quite calmly now, and with precision, he began to undress me. When everything lay on the floor, he went to the brazier and pulled down its lid. The light turned smoky and purple.
“Take off the mask,” he said to me.
I felt utter panic then. Before I could move, he came at
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me, got my hands, and the mask, and wrenched it free. Air, cool and burning on my face. I screamed, again and again, struggling to get my hands free to cover myself, my eyes tight shut. His own hand came hard over my mouth and nostrils to stifle the screaming. I could not seem to breathe, and was losing consciousness, still struggling like a fish in its awful agony on a hook. All my being seemed to be struggle and terror, and behind my lids I saw that mirror under the volcano, and the devil-demon-beast that looked back at me from its burned-white eyes.
It was good for him, I suppose. He was conquering me in my fear, and his own fears, too. I felt him, but it was something done to me, disgusting in its remoteness.
I swam back to the tent from the darkness. I do not know how long it had lasted, but not long, I think. He lay by me, but he had put the shireen in my hand. I understood him, and what he had done, but it made no difference to me then. I held the shireen tight, but did not put it on. Tears ran down into my hair, but it seemed not to he I who wept them.
“No man and woman can lie together as we did,” he said. “This”-he touched the shireen-“has a face of its own, staring at me. Go masked with others, not with me. I saw you before. You can’t be secret from me; every beauty and ugliness and strangeness and difference of yours is mine by right if I have a right to your body.” His hand slid between my thighs, but not to my sex. “You weren’t afraid to let me find this in the dark-or rather to find the absence of it. A woman, but not human. Listen,” he said, but no more after that. He leaned and kissed my mouth, which he had never done before. I opened my eyes. His face, so near mine, was gentle, almost tender. There was no repulsion in it.
Life leaped in me, for there was no repulsion in it.
I saw that he had set me free of something, with him at least, but chained me too, of course. It was a happiness for me, but a conquest for him-of both of us. But nothing mattered. I let the shireen drop away, and put my arms around him instead.
2
Darak rode a little ahead of the caravan, and I, astride one of the smaller merchant horses, rode at his side from then on. Maggur and Kel came behind me, a handful of
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Darak’s men behind him. At evening, when we halted, he would try my fighter’s skill and my skill with the bow. But I was excellent with both; Maggur and the others had been good teachers.
“You have eyes like a hawk,” Darak told me. With the bow I was better than he, but it did not seem to trouble him, surprisingly. He knew his hold on me, I imagine. At night we were lovers in the tent, and later, when the River Road, days away from the river, found the South Road, and the nightmares began, he was very good to me.
It was strange, the way we came to it. We had followed the track so long I was used to its roughness, and the undergrowth which strangled it in the woods, the drifts of loose soil blown across it on the plains. It was a dull hot day, the sky full of black hammerheads bringing the first of the autumn storms. We rode through a little scrubby tangle of bushes, over a small rise among rocks, and the track faded away like a snail’s trail in front of us.
Beyond the rocks, the ground stretched open and flat, and on the horizon stood up two giant pillars, the same brownish color as the plains. Once they had been even taller, now the tops were split and crumbled away, but still towered over thirty feet above our heads. There was carving on them, some deep, some surface, most of which was weathered smooth. I had ridden ahead to them, and Darak had followed me, waving the others back, I suppose, for they did not come up for some time. My face, in its daytime mask, could have told him nothing, but perhaps he knew me enough now that he could sense my thoughts.
I got down and put my hands on the stone. Ancient, ancient, far-back greatness seemed to throb through the pillar I touched. I was cold and burning as I traced the figures of birds and lions, dragons and serpents. A hollow giddiness went through me. I shut my eyes, and under the lids the pillars stood whole, ten feet higher, with capitals of phoenixes and flames.
“What?” Darak asked me.
I had spoken, and did not know what I had said. I could not seem to take my hands from the tall stone. Between the two uprights a paved road stretched away, straight as an arrow shaft, and fifty feet across. The pillars were wide apart, but so huge they must be close together on their own scale, a different scale from anything else around them.
Suddenly the horse Darak was riding flung up on its hind legs, teeth like yellow marble glinting in the storm-light. It
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ran around on itself and tried to bolt. Darak got it in hand a few yards away, but the merchant horse which was mine was running too, straight off toward the rocks. I heard Darak swearing as he spurred after it.
The sky was indigo, choked and bruised with hate; the air seemed filled with the wings of beating blue eagles. Then the cloud split. There was a blind light, a cold heat-boiling and terrible. I felt myself thrown backward, turning in the air, blazing.
Rain fell on my face in icy needles, and far-off thunder curled and rolled. I felt someone’s hands touching every part of me, very carefully. My eyes cleared and I saw Darak.
“Are you hurt?” he said. “I can’t find anything broken or burned.”
Maggur spilled water on my wrists, but I sat up and pushed the bottle away.
Lightning had struck the pillars, but they had received no more damage than I.
I felt light-headed and dizzy, but that was all. I laughed a little. Darak got me around the waist and lifted me onto my horse, quiet now, and trembling. As I smoothed its ears and neck to comfort it, I was still laughing.
We rode back toward the pillars through the rain. As I passed between them I saw the inscription, carved deep into the paving. None of them would know it, for it was not their tongue.