I looked at Darak, and his face was hard and shut. But I knew behind his eyes, as behind mine, the thought of the village would not be still.
Their goddess abandoned them, and the wrath of the mountain came in her wake.
I remembered the altar of Evil, so far away reality had almost faded it. I remembered the voice in my skull: You are cursed, and carry a curse with you; there will be no happiness.
With a silence on us now, and the reddish lamp still alight behind us, we came up to the trees an hour later.
A rider near Darak made a sound in his throat like the barking of a hill-fox, twice, then again twice, and was answered from the trees. Three or four men untwisted themselves from the shadows, and ran up. I saw the glint of knives, but it was all formality. They must have been able to see us for hours.
A few moments in talk, gesticulations backward toward Makkatt, then we were going on, through the trees, among high jutting rocks. Three more halts and signalings with sentries-elaborate birdcalls and passwords-the gaudy toys of dangerous and well-organized men.
Then the ground seemed to open in front of us. I looked between the rock, and saw, carved through the hills, a long ravine. It was about four miles in length and perhaps a mile across, and overhung by the slopes on every side. Trees
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leaned over it, pines and staggering larches. Grass grew in the bowl, and pasture land where there would be brown cattle and wild little sheep. On the east side a waterfall smoked down, and there was other smoke also-and the glint of cluster upon cluster of cooking fires, outside and around the lanes of leather tents.
In the black of night, the downward track was hard and treacherous. Men cursed and horses stumbled, and little things ran away skittering, with bright eyes.
Nearer and nearer the fire blur, the smell of food and huddle and closeness. There seemed no way out now up the steep sides of the ravine.
The track widened out. We were on level ground.
Darak swung down from the horse, his men following his example. Boys came and took their mounts away to horse pens up against the escarpment, but Barak’s horse was taken somewhere else. The place jumped in the firelight, unsteady and uncertain.
I sat still on the mule, waiting.
Darak turned abruptly and came back to me.
I looked down at his face but it was all one with the moving, twisting light. I could not be sure what his look or his eyes said to me.
“Thev’ll put up your tent for you over there, near the waterfall. I’ll send the girl to take care of your wants-a sort of servant, but she won’t sav much about it. If you need anything, get word to me. You’re free to do as you like here.”
“Oh, yes?” I said softly.
His narrow eyes narrowed further until they were glittering slits.
“Yes.”
There was a silence between us, through the noise starting up all around. Then he said:
“I’ve work to do, things to get done. You understand.”
He turned, and began to walk away. A tall slight woman with a cloud of black hair came out of the redness ahead of him. Rings gleamed on her hands and on his as they met. He kissed her in full view of me. There seemed no logical reason whv he should not.
Then she led him into a tent with blue eye-shapes painted on it.
I slid down from the mule, and the uneasy stares of the bandits flickered, heads turned, as I went by them, into the
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dark, while behind us all, unseen, the burning in the sky went on and on.
2
So, I might do as I liked.
This glorious freedom the king had granted me was like a weight around my soul’s neck. He had brought me here-curious about himself, not me-and now, losing interest, he handed me this strange manumission which meant nothing in physical terms, for I was their prisoner in all senses once I knew their stronghold, but meant at the same moment so much; because, by it, he had disowned me. What then had I expected?
The long sleeps came on me again, after that night of arrival. I lay still, as I had lain in the village temple, my eyes often open, in a kind of trance. I scared the girl who came with food and coals and fresh water. She ran out yelling that I was stiff, hard and icy as a block of stone, and did not breathe. Perhaps this was true, perhaps she imagined it, but none of the women would come in my tent after that. Not that I missed them, nor they me. They were a wild bitch race, on their own among women, as I suppose all breeds of women are. They fought for their men between themselves, but did not then ride to a fight along with these men. They dressed half the time as the men did, but cooked and darned and bore their babies as if they had no other function except to be female and subservient. They had their own mysteries, and something in me shrank from their bright golden stupidity, and the sedentary glamour of their lives.
The dreams came. The shining rooms, the courts with their elaborate paving and fountains, all empty now. In a vast hall, a statue of black marble, glossy like glass. A man dressed simply, with long hair and short beard. Not here that face which haunted me, which later I had met in Darak. This was another stranger.
Where was this place, the ruin of my home? I must find it. And here I sat in the bandit’s tent.
There was in me then silent anger at myself. The piece of jade lay cool on my skin, but my life was in darkness.
So the days passed.
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The camp ground was much as I had imagined, pasture dotted with cows, sheep, and goats, an orchard of fruit trees-the leftovers of some old farm, now in ruins, at the southern end of the ravine. There were vines, too, and some vegetable patches. This kind of husbandry was the women’s task. The men hunted when they were not out on other errands, and brought back steaming bloody carcasses with drooping heads.
There were a lot of people in the ravine, and it was a hotbed of their jealousies and quarrels. Some of these came to me-requests for love-potions and death-wishes, which were not granted. As for their sick, when they thought I might help them, it seemed I could do it. Otherwise, I was powerless. This made me afraid. I was the outcast in their midst. They would turn on me at last and rend me as a pack of dogs rend the lame dog when it falls. I had my enemies already-the girl whose jade I took, the man I had kicked in the genitals, and many more now, angry I had not cast their spells for them. Darak ignored, or did not see, this situation. There was a war over the hills, beyond the plains and the mountain ring and the wide river, in the southern desert regions, whose ancient great cities still stood like monoliths. It was another world to the bandits, that land, but it provided bounty. A caravan was going south, packed with war gear, bronze and iron and some gold. Darak would take this, and then barter it, piece by piece, among the plains tribes for their own smaller battles. Or perhaps he would ride south himself (he had done it before), and come into the mountain towns, claiming to be a merchant, with goods and armor to sell them.
I knew little enough of his plans. I picked up some gossip as befitted my station as a woman. At night, when he lay in the blue tent, I eavesdropped by the fires; during the day, I listened here and there as I walked the length of the ravine and back again.
There was a place, high up, near the falling shaft of the waterfall, where I used to climb and sit for hours. Nourished by the water, which broke off in little streams and carved itself channels along the slope, the trees grew thick and dark green here. There was the sweet sharp smell of pine resin, and scents from the various flowers that pushed through the soil. They showed like white bells among the boulders, changing to reds and blues as they neared the stream. Some grew in the water itself, like filmy lavender bubbles, then hardened into purple on the far side where a little mound of
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stones stood leaning together. There was a slight fume of water over the spot from the falling spray. It was refreshing in the heat of the day. I used to sleep here sometimes, glad to have escaped the claustrophobia of my painted tent for a new and cleaner privacy, for no one ever seemed to come here. Lower down, where the fall had produced a round pool, the women came and filled their jars or bathed. I could see them clearly, small as dolls, and sometimes a snatch of voices blew up to me, the words always drowned by the roaring water. Below that place, I would look down again, and see the whole of the ravine, the tents, the animals and Darak’s men, wrestling and firing arrows into a target, flaying dead animals for their leather. It looked innocent and homely enough from the slope, perhaps because I was no longer part of it. I could see Darak, tiny and breakable as an insect, go into the horse field and pick out his black, or its white mate, and ride them, wheeling and jumping, standing up on their backs, somersaulting and coming down with sure feet. Darak the gypsy and the showman, the boaster, who needed admiration like food, yet seemed to know his needs. I had seen him closer, as he rode in the horse field, his face laughing, open as a small boy’s, but, as he came out afterward amid clapping and cheers, the inward-looking amusement of his eyes. He knew.