The energy of that blow was weak, not from her choice, I thought, but because, being young, she had not come to her full Power. Lucky for him. I believe she would have slain him for touching her, otherwise.
Again the mirror. This hubris. An infant unlearned and unlessoned. But if I felt anything, it was not anger. I made my way through the floundering voiceless anguish of the crowd, and came up behind the man, who had fallen backward. I leaned over him, touched him, and healed him.
He rolled over on his face, clutching his eyes, then rolled again and sat up. He had good reason to be bewildered. He could bring himself to his repaired vision only in stages. The crowd was uncertain of what went on, but looking at them, I perceived the Lectorra knew well enough.
I have seen a lair of wild dogs react much the same, physi-
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cally bunching together before the spears, their eyes gleaming and their mouths open to bite.
Shortly, one of the dogs snarled, as one always will.
“You,” Sironn grated, “you’re only a man. What are you doing?”
Then the pack bayed freely.
“A trick!”
“The goddess warned Ressaven of him.”
“He cannot withstand us.”
The blind fellow, no longer blind, leaped to his feet behind us. From his yelling, we became aware that he supposed the bitch’s lightning shaft had healed his eye. It was she who denied it, by slinging a twin shaft at me.
I knocked her feeble Power aside easily. There was a crackle in the air, energy deflected upon energy. The crowd of humans behind me made their first cry.
I observed what the Lectorra were at, a collective attack upon me gathering in their unhuman faces, their vital brains. But they were only children, spiteful because the scourge had never harmed them, because they knew the world was round and they the lords of it.
I had made vows and to spare, but the present cannot be ruled forever by the past. I used my Power for this small enterprise, because it was the time for it.
The Lectorra, all five, I forcibly levitated some feet up in the air, like kicking dolls yanked on strings. I held them like that, with a grim exactness.
They squalled in a panic, and attempted to release themselves, and found they could not. They could not.equal, let alone disarm me. They tried and the bolts and flares of energy they cast at me began .a fetching firework display upon the beach. I heard, from their bawling, how Sironn, the youngest boy, had a voice not yet broken. The little girl-I had lain with younger than she, yet her fifteen years seemed slight to me then-engaged my pity, for she began to weep. The older ones blustered, meaning to kill me, exhausting themselves with their futile thrusts of Power till the sweat beaded and the fine hands trembled. They had never had such a thrashing, and in public, too. At length I let them down, like eggs, upon the snow.
The moment I turned away, one final levin bolt smashed uselessly at my back. I guessed it was the elder girl, who had taken her medicine hardest. I said, not looking about, “Let it
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go, sweeting. I’ve surprised you sufficiently. Don’t entreat for more.”
There was peace after that.
As for the village folk, they had shied from me in horror. I had shattered their legends for them, and their faces were resentful and unwilling. The man with the cured eye was at the fire and pouring beer into himself, and ignoring me the way the feasters are said to ignore Death who sits down among them in the Masrian story.
Then, when I raised my hand, a number flinched and shouted, imagining more violence to be unleashed now on them.
I said, “If you will stay, I will heal you.”
It needed a woman to call, and from the rear of the crowd, “Are you hers-the Chosen of the goddess?”
“No, madam,” I said, “nor do I laugh at the blind.”
“Well, then,” she said, “I’ve my sick boy here. Shall I bring him to you?”
“You bring him,” I said.
They let the woman experiment for them. She brought me a boy with a disease of the lungs. He was coughing red phlegm and had to be carried. I made him well in a moment and, after that, seeing I had earned my salt, the others came to me.
Behind, on the dark night just behind the torches, the Lectorra stood motionless, like five white trees rooted in the silver mud.
I thought, the sores and maladies vanishing under my hands, Here I am again at this rusty gate. Yet I was glad of it. I think, all told, I shall rarely be eager to heal, but it is a marvelous thing, and in truth I am thankful for it at last, aware of what has risen in me from the seeds of indifference and mockery.
And then, at length lifting my head, I found the crowd had slid aside, and some ten paces off another waited, though not for healing.
A sixth Lectorra, a girl, and alone.
Her mantle was bluish black as the sky and the sea had grown, but a white hand held it, a white hand with a narrow wrist ringed by a bracelet of green polished stone. Her hair was white as the moon’s white rising, and her face was beautiful enough to strike through my loins, my joints, the ribs of me, like a note of music sounded in the depth of sleep.
I beheld her distinctly. She looked a year or so older than
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the others, about nineteen. Yet her eyes were swords; they pierced me, then pierced into the white children who lingered there at my back.
“Ressaven,” I heard the oldest boy call to her. “Ressaven, you were not here, and he-”
“I saw what he did. I saw what went before.” Her eyes returned to me. Though she was young, younger than I, yet her eyes were clever in their knowledge. It seemed she could have read me like a magic crystal if she willed it. “You are Zervarn,” she said.
“I am Zervarn. Did she tell you to expect me?”
“She?” This Ressaven questioned as Mazlek had questioned me.
“Your goddess Karrakaz.”
“She is not a goddess, but only a woman possessed of Power,” the girl said. “Your Powers, too, are to be reckoned With.”
“So I believe.”
“Oh, you may believe it,” she said.
She began to walk toward me, and my blood turned like the tide. To stare at her was as if I leaned above a chasm of lights. Of the whole tribe of Lectorra, she is the nearest one to the old lady, I thought. It shines on her like phosphorus, that closeness of Power. The torchlight burned in her hair, and as she moved, I could see the line of her apple breasts through the dark mantle, the dancer’s narrow waist, and strong, slender limbs. The green Lectorra gem was between her eyes, also. She put back her head to look at me.
“You have sought Karrakaz a good while,” she said.
“And you, Ressaven,” I said, “shall take me to her.”
“Perhaps it would be less harmful to you if you left well alone.”
“Does she threaten me, then, the old hag on the mountain?”
“No. She wishes no ill to you.”
“That’s generous of her. I cannot promise the same.”
Her breath carried the scent of flowers, and her mouth was the color of a winter sunrise in that winter face. Lashes, like dark silver blades, did not play about with her straight glances; those terrible young witch’s eyes poured out their naked and uncompromising verity upon me. She had no lies to bandage up the cheats and inadequacies of others. Here was a plain where no quarter was given, or accepted. I tried, for one instant, to conjure in her place the ivory of Dem-
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izdor, the amber of Malmiranet. But the beauty of all the beautiful women I had known was guttering out like lamps.
To test myself, I put my hand on this one’s shoulder.
A shock of electricity went through me at the contact, like Power itself, and obviously through her also, so that for a moment the alcum of her eyes was clouded.
I thought myself then a fool to have searched for kinship among the others. Here was my half-blood, my half-kin. A daughter of Karrakaz. Ressaven was my sister.
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I had come searching for wormwood. I put my hand into the pit of vipers and found instead flowers grew there, and wine cooled in a silver chalice and the sun rose in the black window.
Then I thought, This is another enchantment, one more ploy to throw me from the trail. The hound forgets the scent of the bear when he catches instead the tang of a she-wolf in the spring. She will have me riding her white mare, and unremembering all the rest.