There is no reasoning with a girl in this mood. I got up, took down the silly drapery and put my arms around Hwenit, surprising myself somewhat at my own gentleness with her. Demizdor had weaned me to different ways, I supposed. Jt would have taken a woman who did not consider herself a milk-cow to show me that women are not cattle.
Next, Hwenit hissed, “Mordrak, you are a magician. Make him belong to me. You will be kind, for I have helped you toward your sorcerer’s power. Use it, and help me.”
“I won’t help you to that. Besides, my gift is scarce out of its cradle, as well you know.”
“For this it is strong enough. Oh, Mordrak, I am nothing without him. I shall die of it.”
I laughed, and assured her she would not.
She wept, and assured me that she would.
When she was quieter, she said. “It began between us, between Qwef and me, small as the first thread on the loom. Each day wove a little more. Now the garment is finished.”
I said, “You are his sister, Hwenit. This is why he will not.”
“Oh, the fool,” she said. “It would only make us closer. It is why we are bound. Flesh speaking to flesh, because the flesh is one.”
“Be thankful, girl, you are not a Dagkta woman. They would whip you for dreaming of it.”
“The red people are cruel and blind. Why should it be a whipping matter?”
“If for no other reason, because the children of two so near in blood will be sickly.”
“Are the beasts sickly? The animals of the hills and the fish of the sea, and the birds of the air? And often they mate, parent with young, and the infants of one womb together.”
“Well,” I said, “but we are men.”
“And the poorer for it. I never yet saw a man outrun a beast, outswim a fish, outfly a bird. If they fall ill, which is rarely, they need no healer to tell them what herbs they should eat in order to be well. They take no slaves and make no wars.”
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I said, “There are plenty who would court you in your krarl. Leave Qwef be, and choose another.”
“I have tried. Two years I have tried. You see the result of it.”
“Think,” I said, “what it would mean to lie with him.”
“Trust me, I do, and frequently. Brother is a word; sister is a word. Do you feel a word? Do you suffer a word? Love you suffer, and desire and pain.” She put me from her with cold small hands, and oddly, I saw she was Uasti again, the calm, elder Uasti, deep as a dark well, and sad to the profundity of her depths. “Go sleep, warrior. Leave me my dreams at least, for which your Dagkta curs shall not beat me.”
I left her, but later I heard her rise and go out.
In the morning, I walked up onto the slate parasol of the island, and came on the black clinkers of a fire she had built there, and the tracks of her feet going around and around in the ashes of it. Some circle spell she had made to glamour Qwef.
2
That day, the third, was still and windless, the trees carved on the sky, and the sea tumbling on the beach in slow rushes, without hunger.
Noon came with a white sun; it was chill after the warm foretaste of spring we had been having. The quiet grew disturbing and I fancied foul weather was blowing up somewhere, gale or rain coming back to scourge the island, and wondered how high the tide would run in a storm and if I bad best shift the tent.
There was apprehension in me, too, something I tried to shake off. I found myself going over again the details of that dream I had had, the dream of wings and vengeance that had made me swear my oath to the shade, or rather the memory, of my father. In the dream I had listed, in warrior fashion
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and very thoroughly, my deeds and possessions, even to the quantity of my wives and sons, even to the tribal expression of having slain forty men, which forty stood for uncountable and unlimited numbers. I had also prophesied my own death: an out-tribe spear between my ribs-three days from that night. Today.
This delicacy crawled about in my belly, till I cursed myself, all the more since having noted Hwenit’s burned out witch-fire. For it had come to me, bit by bit, that if the island was hidden in haze and night, one bright bonfire atop it might yet serve as a signal for any eyes on the shore.
Hwenit had kept away from me all day, collecting her eternal bundles of herbs, ferns, weeds, thistles, thorns, and osiers, which she set to dry on little wicker frames about the tent. Her red cat stalked minute animal life through the grasses.
I had gathered earlier that a man would row over for them on the morrow, and to bring news to me, providing no danger from the hunt had shown itself on the mainland. I made a resolution that I would go back with him, whatever had or had not happened. To be stuck forever on a mile of wooded rock afloat in water was not to my taste.
In the middle of the afternoon, a scarf of wind blew up and a light drizzle dappled the island. Presently, the sky opened its doors.
The cat flew in the tent, disliking the sudden bath it had got. Soon Hwenit came running, her shawl over her head, and huddled in beside the cat.
I began thinking of the last cloudburst I had crouched through, in the lee of those limestone spurs, that day the wolf hunt caught up to me.
This rain was like an omen added to my former misgivings.
“Hwenit,” I said, “I am going down to the beach. Stay here.”
She gazed up through her hair at me.
“What do you look for?” she asked.
“My back is crawling. I feel the hunt is coming here, after all.”
“The city men?” Her eyes widened. Abruptly she whispered, “I lighted a fire on the rock!”
“Maybe someone saw, maybe not. I’ll watch for a while. In this rain any boat would have rough work coming in.”
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“Mordrak,” she cried to me, “I could think only of him of Qwef-it was to bind him I made the fire. Oh, I am a fool, and have endangered you.”
“No matter,” I said. “Probably it is some old woman of a fear got into me for no reason.”
But as I went between the trees, I recalled she had not liked me much the night before, and though I did not believe she intended to betray me, perhaps an angry mischief in the dark hidden part of her mind, “Light a big fire, and there is a means to thrash this pompous oaf.” For I had been pompous, and an oaf, for all I imagined myself so forbearing with her. Ride a girl, then tell her who else she might or must not ride with. Fine morality.
The tide was coming in, brown and pocked with rain. Through deluge and spray, I could pinpoint nothing moving on the water.
I waited among the sea wrack, on the slick sand where last night Hwenit and I had coupled. I waited there some minutes before I heard her scream in the wood.
I did what the half-wit would do. What they reckoned on. I turned and plunged back into the trees toward the tent. And right into a man with white-blue eyes and wet rat’s-skin hair, who stepped from the mossy trunks into my path, holding Hwenit and a blade at her throat, and laughing softly, interestedly, the old laugh I remembered well.
They had come ashore at the far end of the island, the other side of the trees. The current was less favorable there, but they had managed it, or, to be accurate, their slave had managed it. This was the Dark Man, the guide who had tracked me from the tunnel and obeised himself before me when I slew the silver-mask with white killing Power. Presumably the guide had returned to his masters next. . . telling them what? Little, I guessed, for the Dark Slaves in Eshkorek had seemed to speak only in answer to direct and unequivocal questioning, never volunteering information on their own.
Apart from the Dark Slave, their navigator, there were two men. The other pair of the four must have grown bored with the chase and abandoned it. These however, had their own personal reasons for keeping after me.
Zrenn stood, playing with Hwenit’s hair and stroking her throat with the flat of his knife, looking at me for my reac-