Qwef was sleeping his serene young man’s sleep not far from me, loose-limbed as a lean black dog. Hwenit had bedded deeper in the tent, invisible behind a drapery she had flamboyantly erected to exclude us.
I got up silently and stole out into the island night.
The moon was down, the wind had dropped.
We had raised the tent in the shelter of the bare trees, near a little spring of sweet water. Several paces farther on the rocky hump of the island started curving up like the shell of a tortoise, a bald carapace of rain-and-wind-polished slate. The island was small, not quite a mile from end to end.
I halted at the foot of the incline: it seemed a private spot.
I had only the tribal ways to fall back on, I had seen no religion or reverence in Eshkorek, save for the spitting of men at the name of Uastis. I cleared a space in the rough weeds, and piled up a mound of stones, leaving it hollow at the center. Into the hollow I pushed dry stems and stuck a flint to kindle them. The fire flared, quick and too hungry, an ephemeral blue. I took my knife-it had drunk her blood in my dream-and stuck it in my arm, and let my own blood sprinkle the blaze. I cut off a piece of my hair and gave him that, too.
I thought I knew what he wanted, my father. I recalled how I had woken once before, dreaming of his death and said, “I will kill her.” Now all the uncertainties, the powers of healing and slaying and all the rest, came together in one ferocious urge I recognized as another’s. The gifts were his,
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the wish was his, the deed was his. Vazkor, unquiet in his death; my unquiet life showed me the manner of it.
I said aloud, soft into the crackle of the brittle, already dying flames, “I swear it, Vazkor, on the fire and on my blood. Vazkor, my father, she has cheated both you and me, and she shall pay the price of it. I will strive to find her. When I do, I will kill her. You have revealed it to me. Now I know. Be still, Vazkor my father, wolf-king, Javhovor, only leave it with me.”
It seemed to me then, the brief ignition faded in the stones, a shadow oozed from the fire and rested flickeringly against the slate wall. The fire’s shadow, a sort of shadowfire itself, resembling the dark reflection of a brightness and a strength burned out what was lingering, with a faint dull luster, in me.
“Believe it,” I said to the shadow.
At that the flame dropped to nothing. I was left with the empty sea-rocked night, and my iron future.
Near dawn, Hwenit stole through the weeds and discovered me sitting there against the slate.
“Why are you here, Mordrak? Are you sick?”
“How can a demon be sick? I’m unused to your tender care. Go back, girl. The sun’s not up yet.”
She slipped close and put her fingers on my neck in a touch that made me shiver.
“You do not understand your powers,” she said.
“That’s true enough. Yet I think now I begin to comprehend the seed that planted them.”
“I mean,” she said, “you have no way to master your powers. They master you. You heal without being aware of it. Perhaps you kill as rashly.”
I looked at her. The sky had paled enough to show me her face, which might have been the face of another girl, steady, clever, and compassionate. I saw then what her priest-tutor had seen, the day he singled her out for healer and witch.
“If I am rash, who will set me on the right path?”
“I,” she said, “if you permit.”
“I permit,” I said. “How do I recompense you?”
“Lie with me.” she said.
“In order that you may make your brother burn? In order that you may pretend I am he? Oh, no, blue-eyed witch. I am not for that game.”
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“Trust me,” she whispered, bending near. “It is you, I crave. Though you are white, you are handsome and lusty.”
“I have been sung that song before, and by women who believed it. As for you, little witch, you are half white yourself, under your black silk skin.”
“Lie with me,” she moaned, melting my ear with her tongue.
But I pushed her off, maddening though it was for me to do it.
She stamped her foot, and ran away deeper into the wood, and presently I made out a reddish cat’s tail going after her through the tall grasses.
When I returned to the black tent at sunup, Qwef was already gone. My teacher-temptress and I remained alone.
There followed two or three peculiar days, during which I found out for sure that Hwenit-Uasti was two persons, as her two namings implied.
Uasti, witch and healer, a woman indubitably honored and respected among her people, wise though young, patient and of infinite sympathy, materialized between the hours of sunrise and sunset. This being instructed me in the shade-walks of my own brain. Her fabulous knowledge, garnered from generation upon generation of priests-those poet-physicians and sorcerer-philosophers of the black tribes-was delivered to me simply and directly. I have met few others since who could compare with, or better, this mentor, a girl more youthful than I, slight as a sapling and mercurial to a fault. I think, too, that she was the superior teacher because she had not the mastery of these “arts” herself, while being fully cognizant of them. She gave me, at any rate, the key to doors, both to unlock and to seal them. A paradoxical key, simple but perverse. You must get it right before you tried the turn, or bring the house down. As to method and logic, to explain that would be to sit ranting in a jar for seven years, as the Moi say. You cannot truly define power, or why power will come. A child will learn to walk, but you must persuade him not to put his hands in the fire.
That, then, was my psychic guide, Uasti, the composed and the humane.
The other Uasti usually usurped her when school was done, first sparking up in her oceanic eyes when the fire was
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banked in preparation for the evening meal. This, in fact, was not Uasti but Hwenit the witch, the one I had met to begin with.
She was all the other was not, skittish, heady, sharp as cat’s claws, and bent on seduction. A sore trial to me was Hwenit. I felt like a man being coaxed to steal his brother’s riches, and the brother off at the wars-yet Qwef was her kin, not mine. I resolved I would not be party to her snares and plots.
We had been on the island two days, and that day’s sun a pale memory of rose across the sea, and the woods powdered with dusk. Hwenit lighted the fire and set out the food, and scolded her red cat, which would not eat its portion of nutmeats, since it had killed a bird in the high grass that afternoon, and was entirely satisfied with this gory fare. The scolding concluded, Hwenit turned to me.
“Tonight I shall gather sea wrack from the beach. Shall you go with me, Mordrak?”
Confusing one Hwenit with the other-Uasti-for a moment, I complied. Shortly, supper finished, I followed her among the rocks and tide-glazed sands. She picked at the red-purple weed and cut it with my knife, then the greenbrown and the black. The light was gone. She judged the varieties by starshine, and placed them in a reed-woven basket.
“Once all weed was black,” said Hwenit. “Then one man killed another and his blood fell in the sea, at which some weed became red. But the green weed grew when the Green Maidens, who live on the sea’s floor, swam up and lay with men. It is not weed, but green hair left for a token of love between water and land.”
Catching the drift now, I said it was a nice story, and started to go back up the beach. But Hwenit, the little fox, unlaced her shift and ran into the sea, and returned like a Green Maiden herself, save she was black not green, scented with ocean, with water-jeweled breasts and chains of silver on her thighs. And that was that.
After, she was silent as a rock, as if she must atone for her pleasure with melancholy as some do. It was not her first time by any means. The black folk had no rigid moral laws, being too moral and too lawful, to construct them.
We went to the tent and she hid herself behind her drapery, and then I heard her crying.
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All this I could have predicted. Her thoughts ran on Qwef. Presently she called out to me like a child, “What shall I do? What shall I do?”