When he called to me, I wanted to turn and would not, and when again he called, I did not want to, and I did.
He stood some yards from me, and said, “Leave the village. Come into the hills with us. I’d like to deprive them of you, the mewling fools. You can heal, I know it. Heal my people. I’ll see you’re fed, and clothed-better than that.”
In his face there was a sort of fear, and it was his own fear that fascinated him. He wanted to explore it, not run from it. I saw the great strength in him then, a man who could look into himself, and look again and again.
And he had looked into my face-my hideousness.
And I loved him with my body, without much hope or much demand in me; and I despised him, and I knew that he would trap me, and there could be no true mating between us, of flesh, of thought, or of soul.
And I knew I would go with him.
Part II: The Hill Camps
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On the second day into the hills, the mountain was a shadow, left behind. On the third, over many slopes, I could no longer look back and see it.
This was a strange open land, high up and near the sky. The hills rolled, tangy-brown, patched with purple gorse and blood-red flowers. Outcrops of rock showed like ancient bones pushed through the soil, and in the skull-holes of caves things stirred-bears, foxes-making their stores ready for the lean months. It was late summer. Already the sap was burning out of the year.
Darak’s band was not a large one-about twenty men. The main camp lay ahead in the hill’s heart. A few village boys had run away with us, anxious to leave the fields for easy pickings on the wide road and cart-tracks south. The men rode shaggy hill ponies, small barrel-chested mounts, hung all over with tassels, bells, gold coins, and lucky charms. The women had a couple of mules between them, and sometimes rode pillion with their particular bandit. Darak rode a black horse, fine and hot-tempered, unsuitable for the climbing, that shied every time a bird rose from a thicket. He went on something different, I thought, when it was a matter of business.
As a woman, I should have walked. As a witch, I had my own mule, brought from some village stable. The red tunic of the goddess was gone, and the goddess’ white mask. I wore dark stuff now, and a face covering-the shireen Darak had seen among women of the plains tribes, whose faces must be hidden from puberty. Across forehead and eyes the cloth was close fitting, with narrow eye-holes decorated by their own raised upper lids, which cast a shadow over the eyes themselves. From the cheeks, over the nose and mouth and chin,
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hung a loose veil of the same material. A woman in the village had stitched it for Darak.
When I had ridden out with them, the villagers had stood in the streets, among the rubble, staring at me, sullen, and afraid that going I took something from them. Darak grinned, riding his black devil horse. A few women plucked at me, crying. I hardly understood them, my ears closed to their village tongue. They were nothing to me, but what then was Darak’s hill camp? There was a weight of iron in my belly, but it lifted as we left the lake and the volcano behind.
He had not spoken to me since the night on the cinderslope. All his words had come secondhand, from the mouths of others: “Darak says you are to have this,” “Darak has told me to tell you.”
At night, when he made camp, leather tents went up, painted with five or six colors. One of these was given to me, and here I could be as private as I wished. I ate a little when I must, and the pains grew easier, but never failed to come. The quietest of the bandit girls brought me the food and whatever other comforts Darak thought I might need. She said nothing, but her eyes darted, bright and black, like two agate wasps set in her head.
On the dawn of the fourth day, a man came with a snakebite, his arm swollen and black. He swaggered in through the tent flap, anxious to be cured without losing the arm, anxious, too, to show he set no store by me. If I did him good, that was an accident of his fortune. He was at pains to tell me what he had been at when the snake got him, which was sauatting amone the rocks relieving himself.
I touched the swollen flesh and looked in his face. He had no blind belief to take the healing from me, as they had in the village.
“I cannot help you,” I said.
He was sweating, and in pain, but he glared at me and lifted his good hand as if to cuff me; then thought better of it.
“You’re the healer. That’s why Darak brought you. So heal me, you bitch.”
A small door opened in my mind. I recalled something, but not much.
I drew his knife out of his belt, and he flinched nervously. I took it and dipped it in the flames of the little brazier the girl brought me at night. I got his arm again.
“Hold still,” I said, and made the quick incision before he
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could protest. He roared like a bull. “Now suck,” I said, “suck and spit.”
He sat with his mouth wide open, amazed at my abrupt movement and the order-crude in its basic simplicity.
“Do as I say,” I added, “before the whole of your body swells up and blackens too.”
That galvanized him into activity. Kneeling in my tent, he set to work with frantic, wide-eyed speed.
In the middle of this, Darak’s hand pulled the tent-flap wide, and he looked in. He had avoided me till now, and today had been away early, hunting; what had brought him here, I did not know. He stared in amazement for a moment at the rhythmically swaying, sucking, spitting bandit before me, then laughed.
“Some new ritual to the goddess,” he said, and went away.
The man cured himself, but it was mere luck.
The day after that, the hills were at their highest and most barren, the soil eroded, the bare rock flanks lying like great tortoises in the sun.
A group of tall trees, elegant and thin as some women can be, stood ahead of us. Foliage rested like black ribbon clouds on their tops, and at intervals in the upper branches. At sunset we began to climb toward these trees, up a flight of natural steps, the broad terraces of the hill. I knew from their urgings, jokes, and different manner all around, that we were almost in the camp now, but I could not tell where it might be. The horses’ small sure feet beat under us like little clocks. Even Darak’s horse was quieter, better and more stable, as it sensed its home. Overhead the red sky was purpling, and the stars were coming through. One fell, beyond the hills it seemed, into the plains there, with a train of golden fire. A bandit girl pointed to it, calling to us to look, but it was gone. I knew enough of their old beliefs-not only from their stories, but from the way they spoke of many things. Men who had not feared the She-One had been reared on other milk, and feared instead the earthshaking serpent, or the grave of murderers. There were terrors in all of them, however well they plastered them over with experience and boasting. The falling star had perhaps been, to the bandit girl, a god, visiting from his sky-house. To another of them it was a warrior’s death as he fell in battle.
Already I knew them a little. A sort of kinship had linked me to them beyond what linked me to Darak, even though I
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was not of them, and their ways disgusted me. Even he, the one I followed here, was their clay, not mine.
A crack of thunder split the sky across. Darak’s horse reared and plunged, its feet kicking loose stones downward to the lower slopes. A blazing dry wind tore by us and was gone, but away behind us the sky was suddenly scarlet and alive.
“Makkatt!” one of the men shouted. It was their name for the volcano.
We turned in our saddles on the uneasy horses, and stared back to the light in the sky.
One of the village boys, who had come with us, began to yell and weep. The nearest bandit struck him into silence.
It was very quick. The sky was red, then orange, then a filthy yellow, then bloodied and muddied back into darkness, leaving only the half-glow low on the horizon, which was the burning villages. The sound came late to us, rumbled deeply, and was gone.