It was a fine pale day, without storm or much heat.
I had gone beyond sleep, and sat like a shipwreck there, trying to come to terms with my own self.
It was very hard.
Certainly, I was not as I had known myself. For all Hwenit’s teaching, I wondered what new wells lay untapped within me. What of those strangest of all strange things she had mentioned, the priest gifts: the summoning of fire, the control of elements, the power of flight?
Each thing, perhaps, was there to hand in me, would come at a need. Yet, as the priests had done, surely I must prepare myself, train myself to be a vessel for such talents.
My thoughts went around and around, availing me little. Mingled in them was the image of the white woman, and the dark man, my father. Here was my destiny. I might look no further. I had sworn an oath to him. Find her and kill her, the enchantress who had harmed both him and me. When I thought back to my dreams, to Kotta’s story, to Eshkorek, it was very natural to me to hate her. So my debate crystallized. The tangle of mysteries was simplified to that one aim: his vengeance, my vow.
I stood up, then, discarding the rest.
If I had Power, I would use that Power to achieve my goal. Let me use it, then.
I cast about. How? I had no idea. It was laughable. Here was a baby who could smash mountains, and did not know where they were to be found.
At that moment, I saw the Dark Man, Long-Eye, standing
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at the edge of the wood, looking at me. I called to him, and he ran up at once, like my dog.
“Lord? How may I serve you?”
I perceived he had made himself over voluntarily as my chattel, having lost his other two masters, and assuming my anticipation of a slave. About a yard off, he kneeled down, and obeised himself. I recalled he had named me a deity, and apparently believed me so. He showed no fear. It seemed that, at the commencement, his race had known gods and no other. Gods had bound and ill treated and slaughtered and played with them. Gods were a fact, as were the sun and the shaking of the earth. Just another terrible reality.
I was not sure if I had summoned him for aid or merely for human conversation, but I said, “To find a witch, what do your priests do?”
“We have no priest. The chief is priest. We do not worship.”
I had begun remembering the krarl, but I knew nothing of the complex inner rituals conducted by Seel and his like ia their stinking dens. It was indicative of my mood that next I said, idly, to Long-Eye, “A bitch mothered me. I am her kin but I must find and destroy her; the flaw in the scheme being that I don’t know where she might be.”
“In himself, Lord Vazkor will know.”
“I do not,” I said, “though I will suppose she is no longer In’this land or continent. I think I would know, now, if she were that near. I think I would be guided to know it.”
“There is a big land to the south,” Long-Eye said. “East, then south. Across the great ocean. Perhaps there.”
When he spoke, it was like a summons. I glanced beyond him, at the curve of the sea. Why not that way? For sure, I could not go back. All was trouble and enmity behind me. I had no hearth, no kindred, nor any service to bind me, and my road had been paved with dead women. I had run toward the shore, had I not, as if it were my beacon?
“Who told you of this southern land?”
“Old maps of the lords show it,” he said. “There was trading once.”
I narrowed my eyes against the glare of the sun, and inside my lids suddenly saw a ship, fat-sailed, black on silver light Precognition or self-deception? No way to learn but to risk
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the throw. Hwenit would live because of me, I was that much of a magician, and Long-Eye thought me a god.
In my current situation, I was, prey for risk, and for any symbol.
To leave the island for the blank wideness of the sea was symbol enough of what I had felt in myself.
Before the lovers roused in the tent, or the boats of the black krarl came from the mainland, Long-Eye and I had put out onto the ocean.