4
I woke when the sun, lifting above sea and cliff, had begun to stream in through the hut doorway. This pale midmorning light was like a beacon of danger to me. I came alert, raw to the memory of the hunt, the killing, the four who lived to dog me, sure they were on my track and close behind.
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I rose at once, and clattered my head against a mummified lizard suspended from the low ceiling.
A copper pot was silkily bubbling on the brazier, giving off an aromatic herbal steam. Hwenit and her cat were gone. Outside, gulls were crying and the goats maaing faintly, but no other sounds.
Then a woman came in with the sun at the door, bearing a reed-woven mat, and on it a dish and a cup. She had come silently, but they were a silent people-comely, too, from the look of it. The stranger smiled and set the mat and the food before me on the rug.
“I am Hadlin,” she informed me, “By what name may I call you?”
The thought of the hunt on me, I answered, “Your witch calls me Mordrak.”
“Then so will I, if it will be agreeable,” said Hadlin, kind, sensible, and very sweet, as if she guessed me in some trouble.
The name Mordrak did well enough certainly. Its roots were in the black tribe’s word for ivory or white bone, but its construction suggested also their obsolete title for a warrior-the black people eschewed fighting, and I would come to learn they never slew even an animal save in self-defense. Their clothes were woven of reed flax and bartered wool, they ate no meat, not even the fish obligingly to hand in the ocean. The food in the dish was, I found after, a steak of beans and chestnuts, baked over the fire, tasty in its own way but curious at first. The drink was goat milk, though, at various seasons, they brewed and drank honey mead.
I sat down again to eat, thanking the woman called Hadlin. She turned to leave and murmured as she went, “Peyuan will seek you in a little while.”
“Who is Peyuan?”
“Peyuan is our chief, the father of Uasti. He wishes to know only if he may help you.”
“That is generous of your chief, but I must be on my way. He will help me best by letting me go swiftly.”
“Oh, but you may go at any hour you wish. There is no constraint.”
I did not intend to be ungracious to this pretty woman with the gentle manner, (I had changed somewhat already from my warrior attitudes, despite the cognomen Hwenit had
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given me). Nor did I want bickering with their chief. I said I would wait and see him, though the nerves in my spine told me I should not linger here.
He was not long in coming, just long enough for me to eat-they were masters at such intuitive niceties.
“I am Peyuan,” he said, prefacing himself with no honorific.
I stood up, careful this time of the dried lizard, but he indicated I should sit, and sat himself.
Peyuan was between forty-five and fifty, his long hair graying, his hard body going to flint rather than flaccidity as he gained years, like a slim, aging tree. He had leaned on a spear, symbol more than weapon, and he laid it between us on the rugs, the staff pointing west in a sign of peace.
“My Hwenit brought you,” he said. “She imagines she magicked you from the ground. She has such fancies, but she is a shrewd healer for all that. She fancies, too, that you also have some magic power, but I shall not ask you this, for it is your burden, not mine. I will only inquire, since you are a wanderer, if we may be of service to you on your road?”
“My chief,” I said, “I am grateful for the help I have already received. I will say this, I am being hunted, and must make on before the hunt comes here and does harm to your krarl as well as to myself.”
“No harm will come to us,” he said calmly. “Will you tell me why they hunt you?”
“An ancient feud. Vengeance. They have a score to settle with my father, and the penalty has devolved on me.”
He looked down at the spear between us, then up into my face. His dark eyes-it was Hwenit’s mother who had had the blue ones-probed me with a solemn concentration, not discourteous but profound.
“I will recount something strange to you,” Peyuan said. “Reply or not, as you choose. You are strong and hard, you have been a fighter, yet you bear no scar. Something in you, the set of your eyes, reminds me of another I once saw, some twenty years ago. A woman. Let me describe this woman. White skin without a blemish, hair like ice.”
“And her face,” I said, before I could stop myself.
He said, “I never saw her face. She wore the shireen. Only her eyes, which were pale and very bright, still-water eyes. Yet, though I never saw her unmasked, she was lovely. This
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you could perceive in her every movement, the turn of her head, her limbs, her body. She would have owned great beauty.”
“You had her, then,” I said.
“No, we did not lie together,” he answered quietly. “It seems strange to me now that, at the time, I never thought of her in that way, never desired her.”
“She was my mother,” I said, dry-throated. “She bore me and left me. I never knew her, but I have heard from some who did. She betrayed and killed my father, that I am sure of.”
“Did she?” he asked. “That’s very odd. She never seemed to me a woman who would kill for spite. It is long since. Perhaps I remember poorly. She came among us like a lost child. We were journeying then; I recall we believed a big cat, a lynx, followed us across the marshes, but it was she. One night she stole the offering we left for our gods. Yet when we found her and took her in, she was withdrawn and compliant. The woman said she wept as we walked. Then she would talk to herself, names and phrases in other tongues. But this ended. If she was distracted, it was the mania some god had sent her. Also, I recollected after, it was said that she had spoken a language very like that which our priests revealed to us, before the krarls were scattered-the language of the Golden Books. That was uncanny, for we were on our summer wayfaring then, making for the sea, and a tower where one of these Books lay hidden. In those days, my krarl came every year .to the spot-it lies not far north of this village an hour’s journey or less. Qwenex was the chief. He brought out the Book when we had gathered at the tower, and showed us. She, too, the white one, put her hand on the gold. Later, after the Summer Dance, when the Circle of Remembrance had been formed, she came and broke the Circle, thinking we were tranced, or dead perhaps. Thus she learned that the pages of the Book are blank, that only through empathy and dream can we reach back to the suffering and the terror, those cruel lessons to be garnered there, along with the lesson of Power. This she did not understand. Neither our Circle, nor our motives.”
I said, “She stole from you, and, as your guest, interrupted your sacred rite. This sounds like her. Did she do you any good?”
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He smiled at me.
“Must you be done good in order that you love?”
“Love,” I said. “If you loved her, you loved Mistress Death.”
“My life, at least, she saved,” he said.
Indeed, he spoke of her as if he loved her, but without regret. I thought of the blue-eyed white woman he had lain with to father Hwenit, and wondered if he had found a ghost of my goddess-dam in her. As for me, I was caught in the tale like the fish in the net. She seemed to have been everywhere before me, Uastis, my ice-witch mother.
Because of this, I sat still as a stone with ears before Peyuan, the chief of the black krarl village, and let him tell me the story of her coming there, and her going away. How at the onset she had appeared in their midst like a demented orphan, lacking home or people, how she had passed from them like the Priestess of the Mystery, into water or air.
The Book was precious to his tribe, and he did not say much of it. It had contained the contrition of gods at their fall, a race of unparalleled magnificence, magicians without equal, ruling the lands like emperors; dying like ants when the hill is crushed. The black krarls, by their rite, strove to glean some glimmering of the old race and its powers, the arts of healing and of mental control, rejecting only the hubris and the cruelty that had evolved from them. Even the Circle the krarl formed about the Book had significanceTime, the never-begun and never-ending wheel, the link of all men to all that had been, all that was to come.