It seemed we were for the old trouble, when a cool amused voice, crackling as snakeskin through dry reeds, called out.
“What’s this, then? Rape-or has a wolf got into my wagon?”
A silence fell, and the crowd parted and let Uasti through. No one spoke or tried to stop her until she came to the rugs, and then the girl reached up and touched her wrist.
“Healer! She was mixing up the herbs-the Givers of Life-I saw her.”
“And so? I told her to do it.”
“Told her-1 But that was my work!” the girl wailed, her face blank and pale.
“Well, it’s your work no longer, hussy. You can bring the food and water from here on, and no more.”
“Healer!” screamed the girl, grabbing at hand and sleeve now.
Uasti picked her off.
“If I decide otherwise, I’ll tell you,” Uasti said. “Until then, you are cook-girl.”
The girl curled over on herself and began to sob.
I was very angry with Uasti, for now I saw what was in her mind-to deprive one in need, and give to one who had no wish for it. She came into the wagon, dropped her bag of potions, and sat in the wooden chair.
I sat by the flap, and said to her, “Why do that? She had served you many years, and was apprentice to your trade.”
“Why? Because she’s a fool and a sniveler. Years, you say, since twelve, five years in all, and she has learned little enough. She’s no instinct for it. And the Touch isn’t in her fingers. I’d thought there was nothing better.”
“Until now,” I said.
150
Uasti moved her hands noncommittally. “It remains to be seen.”
The black cat rubbed by me on its way to take possession of her knees.
“Cat likes you,” Uasti said. “She never liked that other one.”
“Uasti,” I said, “I am not a healer.”
“Not a healer? Oh, yes. And a stone is not a stone, and the sea is made of black beer, and men run backward.”
“Uasti, I am not a healer.”
“You’re a strange one,” she said. “You’ve more power in your eyes than in your fingers, and more power in your fingers than I in mine, and you let it lie.”
“I have no power.”
“But you’ve healed before. Yes, I know it. I can smell it on you.”
“I did not heal. It was their belief I could, not I that healed them.”
I said this before I could keep the words back, and Uasti smiled a little, glad I had committed ‘myself. I became very angry then, and all the hurt and fear and bewilderment crowded in on me. Who knew better than I that in showing another his or her fears, one finds one’s own? Yet I could not help it. It was dark in the wagon, the flaps down, only Uasti’s bright eyes and the bright eyes of the cat gleaming at me, two above two.
“Uasti, healer-woman,” I said, and my voice was a pale iron shaft through that dark, “I come from earth guts, and I have lived with men in the stamp they have given me which was not of my choosing. I have been goddess and healer and bandit and warrior, and archer too, and beloved, and for all this I have suffered, and the men and women who set me in the mold of my suffering have suffered also because of me. I will not run between the shafts anymore. I must be my own and no other’s. I must find my soul-kin before I corrupt myself with the black impulse which is in me. Do you understand, Uasti of the wagon people?”
The two pairs of ice-bright beads stared back, a creature without form, seeing, waiting.
“Look, Uasti,” I said, and I dragged the brazier near me, and poked it into life, then pulled the shireen away from my face.
By the flicker of the coals, I saw Uasti’s old woman’s face draw in on itself, the lines suddenly harder etched. The cat bristled and rose, spitting, its ears flat to its head.
151
“Yes, Uasti,” I said, “now you see.”
And I put on the mask again, and sat looking at her.
She did not move for a moment, then she quieted the cat, and her own face was expressionless.
“Indeed I see. More than you think, you who are of the Lost Ones.”
I cringed at that name, but she lifted her hand.
“Come here, lostling.” And I went to her, and kneeled before her, because there was nothing else I could do, while the cat jumped from her lap and ran somewhere in the wagon to shelter from me.
“Yes,” Uasti said, “I know a little. It’s legend now, but legend is the smoke from the fire,and the wood that the fire consumes is the substance. When I was a little thing, many, many years ago, and they saw I had the healing touch, my village sent me to live with a wild race in the hills, and there I learned my trade. They were a strange people, wanderers, they went from place to place, but they believed they had the eye of a god, a great god, greater than any other, and, wherever they went, they carried a box of yellow metal, and in the box was a book. It was written in a strange tongue, and some of the old ones said they could read it, but I am not so sure of that. They’d chew a herb they grew in little pitchers of earth, and lie in dark places, and have dreams about the Book. But they knew the legends of the old lost race without the trances. There was an inscription on the cover of that Book. The cover was gold, and the joints were gold, and the inscription was all I ever saw. They never let a woman look inside it.” Uasti lifted aside the rugs, picked up the iron which was used to stir the brazier, and sprinkled something from an open vessel on the bare floor. With the hot metal she traced out the words:
BETHEZ TE-AM
And then she glanced at me.
“Well, lostling?”
Those words, so close to me in the green dust she had sprinkled, not spoken because of their power-how new and alien they seemed, for I sensed no evil in them, only a great sorrowing.
“Herein the truth,” I said.
”They called it the Book of the True Word,” Uasti said. “Their god had dictated it, but the legends knew better, and the healers knew better too. So I learned.”
152
3
I thought that I had been one with Darak, in my fashion, forgetting oneness does not come from the body alone. Now I became one with the strange old woman of the wagon people-by an almost imperceptible process that sprang from understanding.
The day after we had spoken together in the wagon, the storm lifted and the camp pressed on. It was late in the year for traveling, the snow very close, brooding behind whitishgray skies adrift with cloud clots. A boy drove our wagon, and the little shaggy horses which pulled it. Uasti often got out to walk, and I walked with her. She was very brisk and strong, and the cold slid off her like water off a turtle’s shell. I did not see the girl who had been her apprentice, except when she brought Uasti’s food. Then she did not look at me, but only at Uasti, pleadingly, like a dog.
But all these things were little things beside the oneness.
In fact, she had not told me so much, but she had known, and that had been a wonderful release for me. The legends they had told her, the strange wild men and women of that savage tribe where she had learned her healing arts, were many-colored and many-faceted, and, as with any legend, one must read between the words, being skeptical but not too much so, sifting and rejecting and searching. There had been a race-the Lost, the Book of the tribe called them, a great race, skilled in the Power, healers and magicians of genius. But evil had possessed them and eaten them and spewed them up again in a new form. Then they ruled with hate, malice, and corruption. In the end a disease had come, nameless yet terrible, and they had died in droves, in the very acts of pleasure that had damned them. Some were buried in the magnificent mausoleums of their ancestors, others, having none left to bury them, rotted in their palaces, and became at last white bones among the white bones of their cities, and even the bones perished. And so they were no more. But the Book, or so the priests said, had persisted in its cry that the old race were not made up of evil and hatred only. Their symbol had been the phoenix, the fire-bird rising from its own ashes. There would be a second coming-and gods and goddesses would walk the earth again.