I slipped from the horse and stood for a moment in the confusion’s aftermath. The fight was done, yet, in this moment, the terror had come to me at last. I cannot explain the frightful sense I had I must go on. I bent and picked up the nearest torch, and threaded among the soldiers, the dead, the frightened horses. There was a doorway, and inside the windowless place, a soft light from the stone bowl on its stand. Beyond, almost in shadow, the great marble figure of the goddess of Orash. I raised the torch and saw her white body, with its draped white skirt, the fall of silver hair, and finally, the face. But she was the first I had seen in the south who did not wear a mask. This was not the cat-headed Uastis. This one wore her own god-head. A sound came out of my throat, a little retching grunt. The torch dropped out of my hand, but the flare in the bowl was leaping now, and I could not look away.
Above the white body of the woman was the white face of the Cursed One-the face of all horror and ugliness and despair, the mark of hate. And I had thought I had not seen before a beast which resembled the devil masks of Orash, the thing on which those masks had been modeled; yet I had seen this thing, could see it at any moment of my life I wished-it was the face Karrakaz had shown me under the Mountain. My own face.
A step behind me. I could not turn as I kneeled in the shrine. For a while there was no further movement, then a hand came coldly and precisely onto my shoulder.
“The goddess worshiping the goddess. How apt.”
“Vazkor,” I said, and even his name, in this place, and at this moment, seemed some sort of amulet.
He lifted me and put me on my feet, but I could not stand upright. The shame and revulsion seemed to shrink me, to eat me.
“Control yourself,” he said to me.
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I lifted my head a little, looking at him. An iron figure, armored limbs, mail plates across chest and back, helm, mask, metallic hands.
“Every City,” I said softly, “here and in the desert, and at Sea’s Edge-each one worships a woman. There are no gods for Vazkor to say he is, only goddesses.” I am not sure why that revelation came to me then. I looked away from him and said, “Orash. Orash, not Ezlann, is my city.”
I turned and somehow walked from that place. In the hall, where men were still taken up with the business of dying, Mazlek and Slor came hurrying to me. “I am hurt,” I said, “not badly.”
And when I lay in my pavilion outside the city, I whispered to Mazlek, kneeling by me, “Is there a limit to what you will do for me?” “No,” he said intensely, “no, goddess.” “Then fire Orash,” I said. “Raze it, destroy it. Leave nothing.”
He was quiet for a moment, then he got up, hissed my name, and left me.
I fell asleep, but in sleep I heard the trumpet call which means a warning. Outside there was great activity, but I knew no enemy was upon us. I slept deeper then. At dawn I woke and went outside the pavilion. Orash was a black City now, after all. Gutted, yawning, damned. The camp was still in turmoil-angry and bewildered at riches lost in the blaze. One of the small fires, they reasoned, had spread, and not burned out as we had all supposed. Not many of the looters had perished; there had been too prompt a warning for that.
Mazlek did not speak to me of what had been done, nor I to him. Vazkor, if he suspected, showed no suspicion. She was a small prize. Her brutal destruction might be more valuable to him than her abandoned hulk standing at his back for an enemy to possess.
It was stupid, what I had done. It should have brought no comfort, for I had not burned my own ugliness, only the mark of it. And yet…
6
From the black shell of Orash, we rode southwest to Belhannor. Here the fugitives of Orash had fled, so the priestess
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had told us, leaving only a temple guard to ward us off. We passed the frozen-hard ruts of their wagons in the snow, but they had been quick in their escape. The only stragglers we overtook were dead ones, abandoned where they collapsed.
We rode close to the western hill line, and passed thin craning trees. The snow was long in breaking that year.
I do not recall much of that tedious march. I seemed always cold and slightly feverish, which led to brief peculiar hallucinations, so that I saw Belhannor ahead of us several times before we actually reached her. I had not bled for forty-two days and would not think about what this must mean.
We saw her first in the late afternoon, under a sullen amber sky, black silhouette of a pale City, white as Orash. She flickered before my eyes.
An hour later our camp was set in scrub woods under the hills. I went to my pavilion, and lay there, neither asleep nor awake, while the black night slid over us. In the dawn there were new trumpets, away across the valley floor. Belhannor, it seemed, was ready to fight in the old fashion, challenge for challenge.
I felt very ill that day, and the illness angered me. I went out and had them bring the white horse, but when he came I could hardly get up on his back. My eyes were swimming, and the whole world of camp, trees, hills, plain, distant army, distant City spun around like a potter’s wheel. No one argued with me that I must not ride out with Vazkor’s troops. Perhaps I looked better than I felt.
Brass whined from either side, became the single voice which sounded the advance, a pealed yellow blade splitting the morning from crown to gut. A lurch of movement, the ground running black and white like broken paving, lead-colored sky with a single rent of faded orange. Ahead, the force of Belhannor, a large swirling mass, not white but iron. Yet it was not the battle they hoped for. Ammath cannon spoke from our left in gouts of smoke and light. The Belhannese lines broke and tumbled apart like toys.
The white horse did not like the cannon. He swerved and cursed them, and soon the stink of powder and scorched metal drove him mad, but not to run away. Crazy as I was, determined as I was, perhaps, to submerge our rampant individuality in the morass of war, he plunged abruptly forward, leaving all vestige of conformity behind. Our own soldiery broke ranks and gave way. I do not remember very well how
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we burst ahead and were flung among the cannon-crippled forward line that was Belhannor.
I felt no sense of panic as fate-which-was-the-white-horse drove me in among an enemy. I was glad, I was exultant, for here was complete forgetfulness. I raised the sword in both my hands, and I was no longer the faceless woman in her trap of earth. I was the first rider, the archer, the charioteer, the warrior. I was Darak, I was Vazkor, I was Death. Their faces, helmed, masked, empty, sprayed up and away from me like the scattered petal-heads of flowers, and the enormous white beast between my thighs danced on their dying. The sky was red from the cannon blasts. I heard the great balls fly like iron birds above my skull, and knew myself safe. In that whirlwind of hatred and joy I found the beauty of pain, the triumphant cacophony of horror which is music. A great tidal hymn, the last coitus with darkness, of which the final note is a vast, piercing, orgasmic scream of agony.
The scream hung white and perfect under me and all around, sinking now, paling into scarlet.
The horse gave a convulsive shudder, scuttled like a ship. I let go of the rein and fell slowly sideways, aware only of the motion of the fall, the horse falling also, even more slowly, until we lay side by side, spent by the act of love, or death.
I woke, and thought I was in my pavilion, on the low mattress with its heap of rugs. Then my eyes cleared a little, and I saw it was a large curtained room, smudged with a small quantity of lamplight. Two indistinct female figures stirred at the foot of the bed. One rose, went out through the doors, and was back in minutes with a tall dark man following. My eyes did not seem to focus properly, and I could not raise my head. The man came and stood over me.