“My congratulations on your fight, goddess,” Vazkor said. “Your last for some time, I imagine.”
“Where is this?” I asked. My voice was very faint, 1 did not think he would hear me, but he had.
“Belhannor,” he said. “The City yielded after the battle, and we are in occupation. The Javhovor is apparently intelligent and has realized resistance is useless. The ladies tending you at this moment are princesses of Belhannor. They are anxious to do all they can for your comfort. Outside, of course, there is a guard-your own men.”
He must be very sure of the City if he had left me unconscious and helpless with these women-I was still valuable to
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him, after all. I could see a little better now, make out their pale and frightened faces. And beyond the door was Mazlek.
“Thank you,” I said. “How damaged am I?”
“A little,” he said, “but you heal quickly. Mazlek and his crew cut a way to you after you fell. The white horse was dead.”
“I will need another, then,” I said stifling my guilt and pain so he should not see it. “When do we ride?”
“I shall leave a portion of my troops here, under the command of Attorl, Prince of Kmiss. The rest of us march at dawn tomorrow.”
I knew then, of course, that the march did not include me. I could tell I would not have mended so quickly.
“I am to follow you, then?” I said. “As before?”
“No, goddess. You are to stay here, in our prize of Belhanaor. You forget your pregnancy. I do not think we dare risk the child any further.”
“The child,” I said with weak fury, “this child does not exist.”
Vazkor turned and moved toward the doors. I thought at first he was simply abandoning his cause as proven, but then I saw he had ushered my attendants out, and someone else had come into the room, a hunched-over, coarse-robed woman with the used-up, swarthy ugliness of the Dark People. She came to the bed with him, and stood looking at me from the blank unmasked face which was mask in itself, and two glittering reptile eyes, carved, black, and empty.
“This is a village witch,” he said, “not worthy of you, but highly skilled they tell me. I apologize for her. But there. It is very necessary you understand your condition.” He turned to the hag, and spoke a couple of words in the village tongue, directions for an examination.
I half hoped she would be afraid to touch me, but she had no emotions left, that one. He had chosen deliberately and well. Her hands were dry and cruel on me, and he stood and watched us as she probed and prodded at my bruised and agonized body, and added new hurts to the old. Finally she stood back, nodded, and muttered something. Vazkor waved her away, and she went out. I knew what she had said, and he knew I knew it, but it was a mutual pretense between us that I did not.
“You are with child, and surprisingly healthy, considering your injuries. You have probably two hundred days yet to carry. In Ezlann your time would come in the month of the Peacock.” He smiled a little. “Belhannor is safe, and you will
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stay here under the protection of Attorl. Your own guard will naturally remain also.”
I lay in the sheets, unable to lift my head. I said, “I will not bear this child.”
“You will,” he said.
That was the deadlock between us.
He went out, and the two Belhannese princesses returned, and gazed in abject terror at me.
Sleep.
He rode out with his army in the morning, as he had said he would, he, the warlord, going on to his conquests. And I was left behind, with no hope of following.
I am not certain what injuries I had had, but in another day I was well enough to rise and walk about my suite of white marble and tapestried hangings.
I was not sure at first what I would do, but gradually I became determined to wrest what I could from the situation-a dry gourd indeed.
From the windows of my apartments I looked out over the snow-draped vistas of the City, gardens below, an icy greenish river straddled by three vast bridges of stone, towers, and winding streets, and terraces of steps. She seemed to have suffered no damage, here at least in her High Quarter. I learned from Mazlek that her capitulation had been swift and total. The Javhovor had kneeled and kissed Vazkor’s gauntleted fingers in the gate-street. They were not used to the true burning breath of war, these Cities which had fought their toy battles for centuries.
Toward evening, after the lamplighting, I sent word to Attorl that I wished his presence. He came promptly enough, dressed for some festive occasion in magenta velvet and many jewels. He was a minor princeling, pretty and well mannered, with a very small mouth. Silvery fair hair coiled on his shoulders. He wore a phoenix mask when he entered, but drew it off for me.
“I understand, prince, that Belhannor has been left in our charge.”
A little surprise. He had understood Belhannor had been left in his charge.
“I see your puzzlement, prince,” I said graciously. “Naturally, you are commander of all our forces here. But equally naturally, your rulings are subject to my authority.”
He looked dismayed, but did not think to question it. I was, after all, Uastis Reincarnate, and he believed in my reli-
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gious power, if he did not take kindly to my temporal aspirations. He bowed, acknowledged what I had said, and I let him go. Thereafter, I was plagued by every petty affair which must be seen to-the curbing of very minor disturbances, posting of guards to police the streets, diversion of supplies to our armies. My interference was confined mostly to setting my seal on documents already attended to by Attorl, or rather by his advisers and scribes, for paperwork of any kind distressed him. Nevertheless, it held for me some vestige of recognition.
The silver-robed princesses who attended me were, I discovered, daughters of the Javhovor himself. They became my official maidens, and each bore that cumbersome and incongruous fan of honor. They spoke only in answer to my commands, which pleased me well enough, and their fright never ebbed. Their father, a pale plump anxious man, came and paid homage to me of his own accord, and sent me sumptuous gifts of jewelry, silks, perfumes, and magnificently bound books, which rivaled even those I had of Asren’s.
It was a dreadful time, Like the numbed white snow that would not break for spring, so my life seemed hardened and numbed by a covering I could not break.
It seemed I had nothing left, only these trivial pieces of power, my own Power, which came with hate, and grew in me day by day like a cancer. And that other cancer he had left in me, which grew also. I did not suffer the troubles most human women experience, there was no sickness or pain, only a sense of heaviness, out of all proportion to what I carried. From the eightieth day of pregnancy, the mark of my subjugation began to swell out from me. I realize I was not very big, nor did I grow very big, yet it seemed to me then that I was huge and bloated. To make it worse, the slimness of the rest of my body persisted; even my breasts grew only a little. More than ever, in the loose velvet gowns I had now to wear, the thing in my womb seemed an imposition, something nailed onto my own self, thrusting out, taking possession; a haunting.
Three times I tried to be rid of it-once by my own will, but the pain was terrible, and I could not force myself to go on; once simply by drinking too much of their wine, which did nothing. The third time I rode out of Belhannor to one of the tiny steadings still left standing at her foot (Vazkor had razed most of them before Belhannor bowed, and her walls were stained with their smoke). Only Mazlek and Slor rode
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with me for the sake of secrecy, but I spoke the tongue of the Dark People well enough to find their healer-woman, and ask her to assist me. She showed none of the alarm or surprise which would have met me in the City. She motioned me into her hut, and there I lay through the afternoon and night in a stinking blur of firelight, sickness, and fear. I had not realized there were so many varieties of pain-pain sharp and bright as silver, pain which burns like molten gold, and the dull booming bronze pain which comes after.
Finally she leaned over me in the predawn grayness.