No, by all of my lost soul. They should not have my shame as a present in their stinking den.
I ducked under his hand, spinning around. My foot, the long toes clenched inward like a fist, kicked up and jabbed home in his groin. No compunction. I had seen what these things, half animal, used their genitals for, beyond the true purpose, and I was arrogant still with a raw and uneompassionate arrogance. He yelped and doubled and fell over, and I knew I had done enough to him.
I turned back to Darak, and he looked surprised.
“Well,” he said, and stopped.
I grasped the second before it was too late, to throw him now while he was unbalanced in front of his horde.
“You are the leader of these people,” I said to him, “and you have a right as such. I will show you what no other man may look on. Privately. Then you can judge for yourself.”
I felt sick when I had said it, sick and sad, and ashamed already. But I knew what must be done.
After a moment he grinned.
“An honor, goddess, to be shown privately what no other may look on.”
Some of them guffawed, and made their various absurd children’s jokes about the sexual act.
One leaned to Darak and said urgently: “Let some of us come with you. Don’t trust the bitch.”
Darak rose and stretched. The big muscles cracked and slid under his bronze skin.
“The day Darak is afraid to go into the trees with a girl, you can get yourselves a new leader.”
He came over to me, got my wrist, and took me out of the courtyard, taking great strides so that I stumbled and had to
27
run to keep up. They laughed behind us, all except the man I had kicked, who was groaning and weeping on the ground.
We came into the terrible dead land near the lake. Great stretches of burned trees, brittle but still standing, where the night wind snapped twigs, and blew off a fine black powder in our faces. Only the water seemed clean. A moon was rising, red, and blurred at one edge as it melted into its wane.
In a way I was surprised he had not pushed me over and had me as soon as we came into the terrible trees. He was a hot hardness beside me, a little afraid without properly knowing it, sexually excited, I sensed. He still had my wrist, and now I pulled away.
“Is here far enough for the goddess?” he asked with stinging politeness. I wondered if he would ask next, equally biting and conscientious, should he spread his cloak for me?
“No,” I said, “a little farther. There is a place for all things, and this is not that place.”
I went on ahead now, toward the shore. I recalled the great sharp stones I had seen lying there.
My feet in the cinders, the water ahead of me, I said to him: “Look around us. Make sure there is no one here.”
“You look, goddess,” he said. “Your immortal eyes should be better than mine.”
So I looked. Then I crouched down, beckoned him to do likewise, spreading my hand as if to steady myself, and finding, without my eyes, a stone so perfect I might have planted it here purposely. My right hand was on the hook of the mask, and he watched, fascinated despite himself, the old rotten superstition overcoming him again. He was breathing fast, his eyes on mine, and my left hand jumped forward and the stone struck him on the forehead near the temple. It should have been a blow hard enough to kill, but perhaps I was off-balance myself, as I had made sure he should be; and besides, he knew in the last instant, and tried to throw himself aside, and he was very quick and strong. In any case, it was hard for me to kill Darak, and he meant more to me than my anger would let me know.
So the blow was a bad one. It stunned him and did not kill, and he fell sideways, and his lashes were very long on his high cheekbones, and I got up and ran from him, in every sense like a hunted cat, scrambling, into the dark.
But somehow the stone was still in my left hand. I could not seem to let go of it, and this slowed me. I was uncertain
28
why I clung to it, but I think I knew he would come after me, and then I must defend myself again. And so it seems I slowed myself by holding it, so he could catch up to me, at the same instant ready to fight him when he did.
This double impulse clouded my mind, and worse, my hunger was on me like a beast. Weak-kneed and light-headed, I found at last I was stumbling along not far from the water’s edge, making back toward the volcano. Once I realized this I checked, panting, turned to the side, and tried to scale the slope there. I should be well away from the village by now. But the cinders and loose topsoil and shale gave under my feet. I slipped and slithered, clawing with my free hand, making so much noise I did not hear the steps behind until it was almost too late. When I heard, I turned, and he was there.
“Come here, damn you!”
His voice slit the night wind. I lost my foothold, letting go the hard-won ground, and fell back, grazed and breathless, a few feet away from him. The bruise was rising like an angry star on his forehead, and his eyes were black with fury. He staggered on his feet, still concussed, but I had done him little damage all in all. He cursed me, some curse of his hillmen I did not recognize except in essence, and then he came at me, and I was on my feet, the stone grasped in my left hand, the sharpest end toward him. He stopped still a moment, coughing a little from the run we had had through the cinder dust; then his hand, too, was no longer empty. It was a wicked-looking knife, thin but strong, with metal bits welded on and sticking out like thorns from the middle of the blade.
We moved around each other, both nervous, at a loss, each again half in the other’s power. And then he recalled that he was Darak, and a man, and that I-mere woman-was something to be conquered and beaten down and back into my eternal submission, not worthy of his knife, and he swung at me with his other arm, and his empty hand struck me across ribs and belly, and that was that.
I lay under the reeling black sky that circled on its crow’s wings closer and closer, the stone a million miles from my hands, and my hands a million miles from my brain.
I remembered enough to shut my eyes as he pulled the mask of the She-One from my face.
Time passed.
I opened my eyes at last, and I think I had lost hold of consciousness a few seconds, for he was sitting some way off,
29
his back half-turned to me, and I had not heard him leave me, or felt him drop the mask onto my breasts.
He was breathing deeply. I could not see his face properly to read it. I turned my head toward the stone, and it lay so near to me now, I thought it must have moved itself. Then it changed, and was the knife that Karrakaz had shown me, the knife that would always be there for me, so I might end my life. And I knew I could tell it to strike into me, and it would; and death would be a comfort. But my lips were stiff and my mouth was full of dust. I could not call to it.
Then he said: “This village has always made me angry. I only remember the beatings I got here as a child, but I always come again to take the fresh blows on my back. So I came again and tried to help them, and they called to you and invoked your name. Let them go, then.”
After that he was quiet for a little while. The wind stirred the lake softly, and the cinders with a sound of dry leaves.
“You,” he said eventually. “I don’t know what you are-a human perhaps, but not of this race. Not of man or woman. Not even of beast. Yes. A goddess, perhaps.”
I put the hooks of the mask behind my ears. The jade I had hung around my neck lay in an icy drop over my heart. I got up and turned away, and began to walk toward the natter land beside the lake, where I could climb free, and go where I wished.