“I don’t want your life,” I said.
“Don’t you? Nor do I, filthy, mangy dog. Listen. She was better than any, fairer than any woman in Eshkorek. And you lay on her, on her white body. Shall I say what became of Demizdor? Shall you like to hear?”
“Erran,” I said, halting. My heart beat in great slow thunders, like the surf hitting the beach below.
“Erran? No. He got no chance. Did she show you the way,
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the old tunnel under the mountains? Yes, certainly she must have done. How did she bid you farewell? Did she kiss and cling, did you have her again, in the -green slime of the passageway? Or did she curse you?”
“Get on,” I said. “If you will tell it, tell.”
“I will tell. She set you on your road. After this, she went to her chamber in Erran’s palace, and unbound the velvet cord from the draperies, and hanged herself with it.”
He was weeping. He was not shamed to weep for Demizdor.
I thought, / have surely known it all this while, known she was dead. At our parting did she not call to me and say, “You are my life”? But I could see her only as she had lived, riding her horse, steady as any brave; in our bed at sunup, golden with sleep; how she had lain with me, crying out my name; her skin, the living warmth of her. Cold now. Empty now. Rotting in some tall tomb in Eshkorek, shut in by diamond-headed nails.
Orek had turned on his side in the grass to get on with his sobbing.
The cat, too, had begun to cry, wailing in inhuman spasms over Hwenit’s body.
And I, caught between two griefs, like corn between the millstones.
The sky cleared. The wood soaked in a sallow sunlight, winged over with damson scud, promise of more ram to come.
I had changed ground. Taking up Hwenit’s body, I had carried her into the black tent and set her on her rug bed there. And found she lived. It was the remnant of a pulse. Zrenn’s knife had pierced up through her breast, yet it must have missed the heart. But, though she breathed, it would not be for long. The cat had followed me, meowing and rubbing on my boots, apparently thinking I meant to help her. But she was past help.
A little after, someone came to the doormouth. Orek, knuckling his eyes like a whipped boy, said, “I and the slave will bury my brother out there.”
“It’s free soil,” I said. “Do it.”
I had realized for some while he would not try for my life;
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his passion was squandered in tears; besides, he had had a surfeit of slaughter.
He turned and went away. They had only knives to dig with, and the slave scrabbling with his hands-it would be a shallow burial, and no gold to lay on the casket.
For Hwenit, she could rest among her own folk, though it would be no comfort to any of them.
Somewhere in my mind, Hwenit and Demizdor were merging. Life snuffed out and beauty turned to cold meat for worms. And Hwenit, my black witch, she had said she would die of her love, the perennial girl’s lament, now proved true. She had never even lain with him, her Qwef, not once. I saw the desert of it, its yearning barrenness. Brother, sister, only words; but this, a reality, the destroyer at the gate. What could it have mattered, after all, to celebrate her hungry youth and his, before the sword fell on her? All the plots and schemes, the moralities and codes of men, seemed dust in the face of death.
The cat came and licked my hand with its rough tongue. I had seen hounds mourn and entreat in this way.
A shadow fell through the doormouth again. I looked; the Dark Man stood there, his arms muddied to the elbowslave, guide, rower, digger of graves.
He would, not speak till I asked him what he wanted. Then he nodded to Hwenit and said, with the first modicum of curiosity I had ever seen one of his race exhibit, “Unwilling, woman?”
This made no sense. I told him to use his own tongue, that I could follow it. Then he said, in a corrupt rattling speech, “The lord cannot make the woman obey? Shall I bring anything to the lord?”.
He supposed that, though she was near-dead, I would restore Hwenit. I had not even considered it. I had healed a horse, a child, half accidentally, but I had not been sure with the horse, and there had been some fight in the child for the healing to work on. Hwenit’s pulse was weak as the flickering of a moth’s wing. Yet when I reached and put my palm on her neck, she was still warm; she had seemed a century cold. Irregularly but continuously, her heart beat. How had she lived this long? Perhaps she clung to her shred of life, waiting for the magician to cure her?
She had helped me, taught me something of my Power.
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I owed her a debt. Maybe there was only one way to pay her.
It frightened me. Before, during those, haphazard healings, I had not thought. Now the nerves ran on me. What must I do? And, more, dreadfully, what was the consequence?
“See to your master,” I said to the slave.
The slave stretched his mouth. I had never observed any of them smile before.
“You are all my masters. Lord Orek, the buried lord, Zrenn. You.” He shut and tapped his left eye. “I am called Long-Eye,” he said. He moved sideways and was gone.
Westering red lights began to fleck into the tent.
I tried too hard to reach Hwenit. I tried to knit blood and flesh with hammer strokes.
At last, sitting bathed in sweat in the black exhalation of nightfall, it came to me how unvigorous and silent it had been before; the poisoned stallion in Eshkorek, the choking baby in the village, when I had not even felt the virtue go from me.
So Hwenit’s pupil smoothed his slate and began afresh.
The sun rose. I left the tent, and the slave was at his grave-digger’s office a second time. This second grave, out of synchronization with the other, seemed oddly superfluous, an afterthought.
“Who is this for?” I asked him, using his own wretched speech.
“My master Orek,” he said.
You harness death; you harness life. You can kill or cure. A grave becomes a symbol, one weak branch fallen from a flourishing tree.
The sun, clear of the wood, swam red and golden in front of my eyes.
I had not expected much else of Orek. Though he was young. I had no compulsion to pity. The slave clamped down the clay to cover the blond face, over which a scrap of cloth had been laid.
“How?” I said.
“His knife,” said the slave, responding to me with a weird vivacity I had not formerly noted in these slave people. “He wedged it among the tree roots and threw his body on the blade. He did it wrong. It took a while.”
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I recollected gold-faced men lying on their swords in a crimson pavilion.
The sun was dividing, a blackness down its center. It would split in twain and fire the sea. Then I saw it was a black man against the sun, standing over me where I had sat. Qwef.
“Tell me if Hwenit is slain,” he said to me.
“Why should you imagine so?”
“I felt it,” he said. “Yesterday’s dusk. I felt she was near death.”
“There was magic between you after all, then.”
“Blood speaking to blood. Yes. I felt it. I could not sleep. In the night I went to look where the boats are kept through the winter. One boat was missing. I guessed then that they had come seeking you. I took my own boat. I rowed through the darkness. Is she dead?”
I got to my feet.
“Look in the tent and see.”
He turned and ran.
Presently, I went to look too. She had been lying sleepily, nursing the red cat. Now Qwef kneeled by her, his face buried in her neck, and she stroked his hair, murmuring. I heard the cinnamon triumph in her voice, ever so soft.
There was a white scar on her breast, like a sickle moon.
The fluttering heart beneath it had faltered, then drummed. She had come back easily from her sleep-the dark ocean, cheated of her, falling away as the waves had fallen from her body that night I lay with her.
The white bitch had healed Peyuan after the dragon’s blow.
I, sly as she, had healed Peyuan’s daughter.
The circle ended and began.
3
I went to the beach on the other side of the island. Zrenn’s stolen boat was aground on the sand, and gulls were swooping and picking about on the waves. Otherwise I was alone.