I did not want to touch this garment, though I was not sure why, but I bent and lifted it, and found a long loose tunic in my hands, and under that, left behind on the floor, a painted and enameled mask. The white face stared up at me. The eye-holes were painted around thickly with black stuff, the mouth was scarlet. The curved open nostrils were rimmed with gold, and little golden drops hung in clusters at each side where ears might have been if the mask were a face.
So, their goddess must cover her deadly visage, the Evess so terrible to look on.
I took all the things into the priest’s room, and began to eat. I had not been aware of hunger until this moment. I think perhaps I could have lived indefinitely without food, sustained by the same weird process which had kept me alive inside the mountain. Now this first meal was oddly unpleasant, and afterward several demons rose up in my abdomen and chest, and lashed at me with their red-hot irons.
I lay down in agony, and, as I lay there, I heard a chant begin outside. On and on it went. They called for their goddess as she writhed in the priest’s room, and then was quiet in the lazy aftermath of pain. Eventually, I got up. Without
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thinking if it were right, I slipped off my garments, and put on the tunic they had left me, and then the mask, which was fixed by hooks behind the ears.
I went out slowly and looked at them.
A sea of people, crouching as before. On the lowest step a bowl of incense smoked over a brazier. Their terrible, almost unhuman faces lifted and fastened on mine, now free to their gaze.
“Goddess!”
“Goddess! Goddess!”
I felt their demand before they made it. I felt their grasping fingers on my soul.
Then a woman was coming up the steps, slowly, holding out the bundle in her arms.
“Take him. Oh, Great One, be merciful-save him-”
Over her head I saw the shadow of the volcano, the reddish cloud still throbbing there like a wound of fire in the sky.x
The baby was almost dead, blue-faced, making little sick retching noises and trying to cry. All around the ruined village stretched and yawned. There was a distant smoke pall near the lake. They must be burning bodies there.
She thrust at me with her child, weeping.
I felt nothing.
“Save him,” she whispered. “My son-”
In anger my hand went out to push her away. My palm slapped against the child, and at once it vomited, black vomit, ashes from the volcano, and its face turned pink, its eyes blazed open, and it began to scream and wail, not the feeble voice of the dying, but the healthy fury and terror of new life.
The woman gasped and almost fell down. Her eyes exploded tears. A man came running up, flung his arms around both of them. Their mouths chanted prayers to me, but every sense in them was fastened on their child, to see, to touch, to feel it live.
Like a tide they broke against me then, begging to be cured of their ills, their pains. Hundreds of men and women it seemed, pressing close. Their smell was of the earth, of the smoke, of sweat, of fear. I touched them, feeling nothing, no power go out of me, no ecstasy of giving, no joy in what I did that brought so much joy. They brought a blind man, who pulled my fingers to his eyes, and saw. They brought a girl, shrieking in agony with a pain in her side, and when my
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hand was laid against the pain, she was still and beautiful again with peace.
It ebbed at last. I showed them my palm, outward, my own demand for privacy, and they shrank away, their voices singing. Into the priest’s room I went, and threw the screen close against the door, and here I screamed and beat my hands against the stone walls until they bled and every nail was broken. How like a prison the room seemed to me, and, even then, I did not realize why.
3
Three days I lay in the room, not eating what thev left for me at the temple door, often sleeping, dreaming sometimes, my eyes wide white jewels behind the mask which I must never take from my face until the Jade lay cool between my fingers.
On the fourth day, there was a hum outside like bees. I went out then, and found a vast crowd of strangers eddying in the street. As I came there, there came also a concentration, and congealing. Soon it was no longer many, but one single thing which waited there for me. For miles around, from every ruined village, farm, town, and steading, they had flocked to me, bringing their sores and burns, entreating my blessing. I, the Goddess of Death, who had justly sent the wrath of the volcano against them for their wickedness, would help them now to make better their lives, that they might serve my shrine.
I touched them and they healed. And then there were more, new faces and sores, and these I healed too.
When the streets were emptv, and the steps empty of all but their gifts, I went in and lay down to sleep again, until eventually the noise would call me up once more. It was like a poisonous wound, from which the pus must be eased, but in which the pus reformed, gradually, after each easing, until at last it must be eased again.
Then came a long time, five dawns, five twilights, when there was no sound. I lay still, listening, my eyes wide. I lay, like an insect in chrysalis, awaiting some wrenching calamity to break my cocoon, and turn me out, half-formed. I was still not a living creature. I was a sleeping silent thing, without substance or true life.
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Then life came, but wrongly, not as I would have wanted if ever I had been allowed to plan.
There was a great crash of sound: something thrown aside at the temple door, the gifts of untouched food, perhaps. There were steps, brutal, tearing the quiet of the place. I heard and smelled unfear. No terror in this one who sought me, only a raw, uneasy anger.
“Come out, you she-beast!” a man’s voice shouted.
It seemed to burst the temple walls, and break inside my head in brass pieces, that voice which had no fear, the first human voice that had no fear of me.
I got up, summoned irresistibly. I stood by the screen, and already my heart was moving, pounding as it had when I fled from the volcano, although now I ran toward the fire, and not away.
Then the great hand of the voice was on the screen, and the screen was thrown aside, little bits of the lattice snapping against the floor. He was ready to seize me next, fling me aside, my little bones snapping like the ivory. But he was still. No fear perhaps, but ingrained superstition. They had worshiped the She-One, each from birth, and now he seemed to see her here-red robe, white hair, like the red-hot, white-hot spew of the mountain, and the mask, so terrible because it said nothing but “I am here.”
Under the deep tan of endless sun, his face paled slightly. His lips drew back from tiger-teeth, wolf-teeth, snarling white. He was so much larger than I, taller, great bones, a big spare frame, beautiful and alien in its masculinity. Yet our looks seemed level. Long curling black hair ran down from his head to his shoulders like the black wool of a ram. He wore no mask but his face shook me through and through in a way I could hardly bear, for this face, this seen face, was the face in my dream-long, male, with high-set, narrow, black-chip eyes.
He cleared his throat. His tongue darted on his lips to moisten them, and we stood, each one half in the other’s power, and my sex stirred in me, and woman stirred in me, and an ancient humanity I had not known was mine.
And then he made himself move. His hand closed on my shoulder, hurting and immediate. In the other hand came a dull, sharp hunting knife.
“Well, bitch, and who are you?”
I said nothing. I looked at him, drinking him to quench the surge of life burning up in me, which was not quenched but only burned the brighter.
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“You don’t make me quake, bitch. Some healer-witch from a cave in the mountain, eh? Come to live off their charity because they’re fools and afraid?” His hand reached into my hair and pulled it hard. “Hair of an old woman, but not the body of one. And your face, behind this mask-what?”