When the white witch broke the Circle, Peyuan saw her, the way you could see such things, he said, though the soul was gone to ride the winds. He became certain afterward that Morda (that was the name the krarl gave her, sufficiently similar to mine, so that I winced at it) had been a survivor of the lost Magician Race, her abilities destroyed or mislaid. And this heritage of glory and fear drew her, repelled her, drove her to strange deeds and sorrows.
When the Circle disbanded, Peyuan and two others, Fethlin and Wexl, were also drawn, or driven, peculiarly, to follow her. They had no reason for this action. It was like the urge to shift ground with the seasons, the nomad’s instinct, yet it was stranger. They knew it came from their gods, or from Morda’s gods, and there was no resisting it. Nor did it exactly
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trouble them to do it. They had a saying: At some hour, every man must sacrifice. Their hour had arrived and they were ready. It was she, Peyuan remembered, who had been uneasy, almost frantic when she glimpsed them, crying out they must go back, go away, that she would not be responsible for their lives, which they would lose if they remained. But she could not shake them off, and in the end she was silent, hanging her head, as if in despair or shame, letting them accompany her.
Southward from the tower lay a bay and white ruins, the decayed cities of the Lost Race of the Book. It was to these ruins she had gone, and into those ruins she went, they going behind her.
She was plainly searching, this woman-exhaustedly, proudly, and wildly searching for some clue, some hope, or maybe merely for death.
“Sometimes,” said Peyuan, “she was like an animal, swift and alert, trembling with a sight of things men never see. Sometimes she would walk like a little girl, like a daughter who is seven years old and asks to be carried because she is so tired; and it would need all my strength not to pick her up in my arms. Then you would see abruptly the witch-power, the royalness. She would move like a white spear through the shadows, and there would be gold binding her hair and golden scales her body, though she wore the krarl woman’s dress and no ornament of any kind.”
Yet she did not find what she sought, though he told me a tale of perils, a tremor of the earth, and finally a dragon, from which, he said, she had saved him by bravery, sorcery, and an acquaintance with the gods. True, the beast had smitten him first, a blow of blows. Yet when it had been slain, he had started up alive, apparently to this incorrigible witch’s delighted surprise. She had touched his shoulder, as if to be sure he was real. Seeing the joy in her eyes, and sensing it in her touch as she appraised him sound, he hugged her close.
“She had a fragrance to her,” he said, “a green pure fragrance like spring leaves or the smell of the morning on the hills. It was not a perfume, some cosmetic from a jar. It was the actual scent of her flesh. Holding her, I felt only love, not desire or heat. She was like a girl I had known the whole of my life, someone who had never failed me, who had always been gentle, someone who had enriched my days. And
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now,” Peyuan added, “seeing you will not otherwise believe in the dragon, let me show you proof.”
He turned himself that his back should be to me, and lifted up his long, graying hair. On his neck and up along the lower ridge of his skull was a cindery toothed scar, broad as two fingers of my hand. The sort of wound a curved blade would make, or an enormous claw.
The sort of wound, too, from which a man should not recover.
“I never guessed I wore this,” he said. “It was my wife who found it, the white girl I wed, Hwenit’s mother. She asked had I got it in some battle. Thus, on my marriage night, I discovered that I had come as near death as a man may that half year before, out there on the black beach, my scalp opened by the lizard’s paw. It was she, Morda-by some exercise of her lost Power, by her passion and desperation that I live-who had turned death aside from me, and healed me and made me whole. But clearly she never knew fully what she had done.”
Then he glanced about, and observed I had swallowed his words like a dish of salt, unwilling and choking on it, but to the last grain. And what now should I do with this woman, half malefic, half tender? No, his account concerned a moment of her existence; her aspect had been benevolent to Peyuan and he had loved her. If this were true with him, she had been other things to other men. My father had not profited by her, or considered her benign.
“What comes next?” I asked Peyuan. “A god, maybe, on silver wings, to bear your lady into the sky?”
“No,” he said, “it is less gaudy that that. The dragon dead, we slept past sunrise on the shore. There had been a watch, and I near asleep at my part of it, and she told me she would stand in my stead. But when we woke-Fethlin, Wexl, and I-the sun an hour risen, and she was gone. Only her footsteps, which led down into the sea, showed the path she had taken.”
“Into the sea? She made some big fish his breakfast, then? More likely she stepped through the shallow water, and came ashore again at some other bay.”
Peyuan nodded.
“Yes. But there were lights seen in the sky, the night of the
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lizard, and other nights. Like great stars falling to earth and departing again.”
“Thus. She is a godddess. It is a pity she didn’t want her son. He might have had some rare times with her in her palace of jade and crystal up in the air.”
He regarded me gravely, and he said, “Now I see one scar, after all.”
“You have the scars,” I said, “not I. One on your skull, one on your memory.”
“I am rebuked, and justly. I did not mean to anger the guest of my krarl.”
I was at once uncomfortable for having spoken roughly; he had been courteous enough to me, if too quick for my liking.
“No, it is I who am to blame, my chief,” I said. “Let us forget the woman.” Then, for courtesy’s sake only-I had begun to remember the hunt again at my back, and the need to be off-I added, “But tell me why your people settled here, for you were travelers formerly?”
“Oh, that is a small thing. I met the woman I spoke of, a fair-haired girl of the yellow Moi tribes, one day when we had gone to barter with them. I was younger then, and I won her liking and wed her. On the marriage night she found the scar for me, the lizard’s token. She journeyed that year with us to the sea. She had never looked on the ocean before. It drew her, as some it draws, like a charm or spell. When the time came for going inland, at the year’s turning, she was sorry, though she tried to make light of it. I had already taken her from her own folk, now I did not wish to take from her the sea. Besides, she was already quickened with our daughter. And I had been considering, too, I will admit, that my life had almost ended once in the dark sea bay, when the dragon struck me down; it seemed in some manner fitting that I live out my restoration near that place. So we chose this spot, on the route of the old Summer Dance. The land was not bad, and would grow vegetables; there were wild fruit trees and grazing for the goats-I had but five then. The ancient cities lie almost a night’s journey away to the south; we do not like to dwell too near them. Having said I would remain, become herdsman and gardener of the soil, two others elected to remain with me. Not my earlier companions. Wexl had married and gone elsewhere. Fethlin, too, was gone northward to seek the wandering priests, or the priest-hermits who live in the
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mountains there. Some say there are priests of the Book, healers and nomads, who live beyond these mountains and beyond other mountains also, unaccountable distances north and west. Maybe Fethlin sought even this far, for he was unquiet after Morda left us, saying his own gods had laid it on him to guard her, that he had failed, and that the work was forever unfinished.