Finally, she put her white-gloved fingers on my arm and said, “Let me guess. You’re going over the river to Kainium, to ask for the goddess. Ah!” she added, triumphant. “He blanches! So. I am right.”
Whether I lost my color, I hardly know; I think I must have done. Expecting it all this while, the shock of finding it jolted me.
“Kainium,” I said. “Which goddess is goddess there?”
She smiled, taking on her, strangely, a kind of occult air by proxy.
“I don’t know for sure, Zervarn my darling. They call her Karrakaz.”
My heart hit my ribs. I said, “That might be she I seek.”
“Go then, chase your goddess. It is some two hundred miles away, and then you must cross the river. Better to remain with me.”
I told her I should never forget her kindness in directing me. She kissed me, and we parted.
Two hundred miles, a river, a name: Kainium. I foresaw a little farther than that: a breadth of sea, and from the sea, lifting, a shoulder of alabaster. A white mountain rising from the ocean, face to face with a scatter of a city on the shore.
I had bad dreams that night, lying in a ruinous watch tower above the coast where the steel-blue sea ran in and out among the ice floes. Malmiranet was carried dead to her death box, and the outer air gushed in to waken me in mine; Demizdor was swinging from a silken rope, her neck broken like a bird’s; Tathra lay between my hands with her unblinking eyes…. It all returned to me, and more.
Then, near dawn, this: Noon on a cold slope, white snow down, white sky above, at back the smoke-stained wall of a city. Between the slender penciled shapes of winter trees, a woman and two men riding. Light lost in black garments, bright as arrows on metallic masks. The men wore the Phoenix of the cities, though not like the designs that I had seen
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in Eshkorek, cast in silver. The woman wore the face of a cat, cast from warm yellow gold, with green gems about the eyes, emeralds dangling from the pointed ears, and golden plaits behind, mingling with her white hair.
They came into a miserable scramble of huts. It was a steading of the Dark People, Long-Eye’s multitudinous slave folk. I saw the gray-olive wooden faces, the rank blue-black weeds of hair. A crone came up; the woman dismounted from her horse and went away with her into a hovel.
So much I had seen from a distance. Now something drew me close, into the door. I saw women’s things: blood, pain, vileness, through the smoke. The crone bent to her task like a black toad. What she did sickened me, yet I could not look away.
Uastis the goddess groaned only once. She was brave as she tried to get rid of me in the healer’s hut.
The day washed out in night, the night into a predawn gray.
The white-haired woman stirred. She whispered. “Is it finished?” Her voice was very young (she had been a girl then, hard to remember it), very young and tired, worn out with hurting.
The black toad crouched there and said, “No.” Uastis said, “What now, then?” She braced herself for what would be next, the way a man will when he’s told the probe must go deeper yet to free the spear-head from his flesh.
The toad woman said, “Nothing now. A loving child. He will not be parted from you.” And Uastis sighed, only that.
Yet her desperate denial, locked up in her brain, rent me, burned me. I withered in it. She would have cut her womb from her with a knife if she could have cut me from her with it.
I woke in a sweat, and some of the salt in my eyes was more than sweat or the sea, for the habit of tears, once learned, is facile. I thought, Well, but I knew this all along, that she hated me. Though I did not know she set bone instruments to dig me out, yet I might have reasoned it. Well, but I live, I live, and she’s near and shall answer.
I felt a depression like a black cloak smothering me.
I got up, and started out on the two-hundred-mile walk to the river, and Kainium.
It was nearer to the spring in that direction, still winter but more yielding.
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I passed through several towns, something in them of that northeastern style I recollected from the ruins of my warrior youth. White arcades, tall towers that no longer looked so tall to me, roofs of colored tile. Westward and inland there was a form of government, some prince or other sitting on his backside ordering this or that. Here, along the coast, was a shore province, far-flung and considered feral. Such gems of information I picked up from gossip as I went through. I was more interested in other news.
I heard a deal of her, of Karrakaz the goddess. The closer I got to the river estuary, the more I heard. Kainium was a rough, haphazard area, less lawful than this provincial coast It was where one went to get ensorceled. If one came back, one came back with goafs ears, or in the form of a warmwater seal. For the home of the goddess, that was a mountain of crystal out in the ocean. Sometimes there would be a road on the water that one could cross over by, sometimes the sea would cover it, and sweep the unlucky into the depths. If one were sick, one might risk the journey. Men in the last months of terminal disease had reputedly returned whole and well unless they had got goat’s ears, or been changed into a seal, presumably.
Within ten miles of the estuary the towns had given way to villages. Here they spoke a different dialect, and had a new name for Kainium that meant “The Lost Children.” That took some fathoming, and they had not bothered to fathom it. An old fisherman declared to me that it meant babies were sacrificed, to appease the goddess in the sea. I thought to myself, Only one, and he is here.
The land rises above the estuary. An ancient track, once paved, now broken and all over snow and weeds, led me to the brow of the rise. Winter woods ran down to the river, which was soft red with evening light, the sun setting across the curve of the water into the farther curving of the shadowy shore. The estuary was about three miles across, broadening into a sea like a plate of rosy lead beyond. One ultimate small village crouched below, in the lee of the wood.
I had not meant to enter the village; I had no need of it, no need of food or particular shelter, and I had got used to roughing it. It was what I had been bred to, indeed, in my tribal days. But a man came by, driving six curly tabby goats, assumed I was making for the village, and volubly bore me along with him. It turned out there was a makeshift inn there, and the goatherd was the innkeeper’s brother.
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The inn was a poor place, catering to liquor-liking peasants, and the odd ship that swung this way into the estuary, making for the towns upriver. The walls were checkered with red and brown squares, and beans and shallots hung from the rafters, and fish above the hearth to smoke, and dogs ran about the floor in the industrious, urgent way of dogs.
I had no money, and ended by bartering my Sri cloak, muddy but serviceable, for bread and beer I did not require and subsequently ignored, and a rickety bed upstairs.
In such a spot, a strange face will always cause a stir. To this flaxen people, my coloring alone was of interest. Darker men apparently came from the inland regions. Their prince had raven’s feathers like mine, they said. I told them I hailed from some town I had heard of farther south, of which they knew nothing. With their altered speech, even my new adopted name passed unchallenged. It was the cognomen the girl had gifted me with from her litter. “Dark Acquaintance,” Zervarn. The idea of entering the witch’s stronghold garbed in my father’s name had begun to unnerve me. I had no right to steal that after all she had stolen from him, and maybe I had no right to anything of his. I would go to her a stranger.
They were friendly people in the village, not thick-witted as such outlanders often are, but swift and curious. They had concluded I was going over the river, and said not a word about it, except for a man who offered to row me to the shallow water in his fishing boat, but no farther. Could I wade the rest? I thanked him, said I could, and asked him what he feared.