I do not properly recollect what I felt. That she recognized me was sure, that she craved something of me also was evident. My heart beat in heavy leaden strokes, knowing already. She was a Masrian slave, tall and slender. She would have had a look of Nasmet, but for her sadness.
“Forgive me if I am foolish,” she said. “It can’t be, for they told us he was dead, dead for thirty days now, and buried secretly at the order of the Empress.” I could say nothing. She said, “But I have often seen him, here in the Palm Quarter. He was a sorcerer, and he could heal all sicknesses. Or can it be that you, sir, are Vazkor?”
Then I found I was answering her, not meaning to.
“And if I were Vazkor?”
The tears streamed from her eyes. She, too, dropped on her knees.
“Oh, my lord. It’s my child. They said you would not heal anymore, but I will pay you anything. My master is rich and careful for me-anything, my lord.”
The male slave, who had been standing looking warily at us, now moved up and put his hand on her shoulder.
“It’s no good, lady. Suppose he were Vazkor, he could do nothing. Your child died last night. You know it. We all
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know it, and grieve with you, even the master. But that’s an end.”
But the girl raised her face to me, running with its tears, bright with them and with a burning hope, and she said, “Vazkor could raise my child. He could raise the dead. Oh, my lord, make my child live again.”
A warrior does not learn how to weep in the krarls of the red people, nor can he learn it after in hubris and Power. Yet there will come one day a blow so gentle that it will split the rock and find the spring beneath. The fates are kind to women, or to any that can with ease wash the sores of life in such water. Even when it comes hard, it is a balm.
Yet I had enough of my past still with me that I turned away from her, that she should not see me weep.
Easier to hide a wound than crying from a woman. She knew at once, and at once she was changed. She rose and put her arms about me, and held me like a child, like her own maybe who was gone, and whom I could not give back to her. As if she understood it all, she asked no more of me. Nothing she had from me, yet she would comfort me, and truly, I found comfort there in that leafy street beneath the enameled wall, with the stoical slave idling nearby till our display should be done.
At length the well ran dry. Her own tears she had put aside. She said she was going to the goddess on the hill, that this was a mighty deity, dispenser of calm and consolation, and that I must go also, to be calmed and consoled. Because of the curious thing between us, I went.
The turf was extensively disfigured beyond the old palisade by the marks of the plague fires. This different aspect, the daylight and my own brain, kept it from me some while that I had journeyed this way once before, and that my friend was conducting me to the shrine that stood above the Lion’s Field, that dueling ground of princes. I had fought Sorem there, and after him certain others, beneath the eye of the shrine’s goddess. Later, I had disrespectfully burned the black poppies on her altar to give me light, when I watched the Hesseks climbing from the northern wall and the sea.
There were no poppies there now but a green-gold ear of grain and some honey in a crock. The stones were briar-grown as ever; I wondered, if they reverenced her, that the slaves never cleared these away. But my friend explained to me, seeing my look, that the goddess preferred the living
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thing to twine about her. In fact, no offering was set there, even a flower, unless it came of stock already plucked for use.
“She left you strict orders, then,” I said.
“Ah, no, she asked for nothing. The offerings do us good, for the act of giving, however small, is beneficial.” She herself had brought a flagon of cinnamon oil. Her tears returned and she poured them, with the perfume, on the stone; the smell of the oil was pleasant in the clean salt-freshened air. Then she kneeled and whispered on the west side of the altar. I turned away to let her pray in peace, as Chem had done. Shortly, she called to me, and her face was different, not happier, but with a kind of quietness.
She deceived herself into this serenity, thinking the diety had blessed her with peace, but what matter, if she could bear her sorrow more easily? But the girl was there before me again, and she said, “It’s not the goddess who takes the burden from me; I find the strength within myself, through her memory that lingers here.”
This seemed an advanced, unusual teaching.
“Is your lady old or young?” I asked.
“Young,” the girl said. “Something less than twenty years ago these stones were raised to her. And she’s real, too; my mother spoke with her. You won’t credit me, but thus it is. Shall I tell you?”
I said, glad to humor her, that I should like to hear.
“The city was not so great then. My mother dwelt hi the southeast country, among the valleys there and the hills, where the southern lakes begin. She was in the fields, near sundown, when she saw a woman walking between the sheaves. Now you must remember this, the light was fading, Masrimas’ sun going out, but still the woman shone and gleamed. It was from her skin and her hair, which was as white as alabaster, and her face-my mother said-was too beautiful to bear.”
I had caught my breath.
She did not notice; she said, laughing, “You’ll disbelieve it, but listen. The track between the sheaves led by the spot where my mother stood. Soon the white woman had drawn close enough to touch, and my mother, who was afraid, sank on her knees. She was carrying then, with me, and maybe more fanciful because of it. The woman turned, and she said to my mother, ‘Will you tell me if there is a town across the hill?’ My mother managed to say that there was. She was sure
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the woman was a sprite, for she could speak hill-Masrian quite perfectly, though clearly she was a stranger. But then the woman, who was looking at her without menace or contempt, said, ‘You have a child with you.’
“My mother started, expecting her womb to be cursed, but the woman stretched out her hand and laid it on my mother’s cheek, and at once, my mother would tell me, all her fear left her. The woman said, ‘When your labor begins, think of me and you will have no pain. The birth will be swift and uncomplicated, and the child strong. Though I fear,’ and here she smiled, ‘you have a girl inside you, not a man, for which perhaps you are sorry.’ My mother was dumbfounded, and begged to serve the stranger, to bring her food or drink, but the stranger said she lacked for nothing, and went on into the dark.
“And now, here is the magic part. When her time came, my mother recalled vividly what the stranger had said. She invoked her name-did I say the woman gave her a name to speak?-and suddenly her birth pangs left her, and I was born inside the hour, the girl she had been promised, healthy as an apple. Doubtless you consider this a foolish romance, but the pain of birthing is not pleasurable, and a woman surely knows when it is gone from her by a spell.”
I got my voice, and asked, “Did your mother reckon her goddess, then, or witch?”
“Something of both, maybe. But it was in Bar-Ibithni that I heard the name of the stranger again. Generally it is the poor who cleave to her. They say she came this way, traveling to the northwest-to Seema, maybe, along the ancient route of the wagons.”
“To Seema,” I repeated, and turned my head westward involuntarily.
“Yes, my friend said. “That is why they have carved her image on the west side of the altar here.” She led me aside to show me.
I had not seen before. I had not thought of such a thing; that what I sensed of the presence of Uastis here in BarIbithni was only the memory of her traveling, this ancient remembrance, that while I scoured the city and its environs for news of her, her token had been here upon the hill, where I leaned that night and watched the Hesseks come from the groves and the sea. I wondered if those paid searchers I had set to find her had simply missed this obscure sect of a white