Ressaven. My sister.
I could recall, if I wished, Peyuan’s daughter, black, blue eyed Hwenit, her overfond liking for her brother, and my portentous verbiage upon the matter. And here was I in the same case, lusting for my sibling, and the morality of it, the incest-damned and inappropriate word-slid off me with the ease of smoke. I needed no argument to fortify myself. Confronted with the fact, no ethic restrained me, nor seemed to have a right to.
Maybe she noted the passage of this through my eyes, for her own became suddenly extraordinarily still, almost opaque, as if she heard some word inside her mind that frightened her.
Karrakaz had sent her to me, yet not warned her of the outcome. Then again, perhaps even this was part of the drama, the dream, meant to ensnare me. The mortal crowd had melted back toward its wagons, and the Lectorra came slinking up to Ressaven now. They apparently held her in some awe; no doubt, being the first among the first, Karrakaz
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had made her their mentor, the intermediary between them and the goddess.
She turned from me and said to them, “You have the blood of the Lost, and you become like them. Always I have been with you before on the days of healing. This one time you have shown me how it is with you.”
The talkative oldest boy gazed at her defiantly, revealing his unease.
“You tell us the Lost Race perished because of their pride, but they had a right to be proud, and besides, Karrakaz lives and she is of their race, and, as you say, we are descended from their seed, which they spilled in women’s loins centuries ago for amusement. That is why she chose us, since we bear their likeness. So they are not dead, Ressaven. See-here they are.”
“Yes,” she said. Her face was grave, and her voice, though it had no anger, was like steel. “They are here, in you. Humanity’s curse, which found them out, may find you also. Think of that.” Then she observed that the younger girl was crying again, and she went to her and stroked her hair gently, and said, “It is hard, I know it. It is very hard.”
Presently, like the children they were, she sent them home to the island. The tide shifted about this hour, leaving bare an old causeway that began in the sea a quarter of a mile out from shore. The quarter of a mile, needless to relate, they ran over, and the village people moved from their fire and their wagons to watch that white flitting of specters walking on the ocean. For me, the villagers had few glances. I was the unknown factor, I did not fit into their scheme either of normalcy or the supernatural, and was best ignored.
“You were lenient with her brats,” I said to Ressaven.
“And you were harsh,” she said. “You have encountered the fire that burns and fines; you have come through it. They have no fires, no ordeals, no yardstick.”
“You are Lectorra, too. How is it Ressaven is not like the others?”
“I have had my fires,” she said simply. “Not all of us can avoid them.”
“Also,” I said, “you are nearer to the lady on the mountain, are you not? A deal nearer.”
She looked very long at me. You could tell little from her face, only this youth, this loveliness, and this stunning clarity.
“You are the son of Vazkor. Truly.”
“Truly I am,” I said. After what I had thought in the val-
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ley, of his memory going from me, it was strange she should say this to me. The surf made its noises pulling from the beach. The mountain had faded from red to gray. “She told you everything, did she?” I said. “How she would have skewered me forth from her, and when she could not, and had murdered him, she left me to become a boar-pig among the tents. I might have been a king, but for her meddling.” But when I said it, I tasted how stale it had become, my eternal accusation, with so much use.
As if she knew that, she said, part smiling, “You are a mighty sorcerer and a mighty man, and could carve a kingdom, if you wanted, from any portion of the world you chose. No one made you a king, Zervarn. You have made yourself what you are. Be glad of it, for it is better.”
“How am I to judge that?” I said. “I never had a chance at the other.”
“When she bore you, Karrakaz had no birthright to offer you. For herself she hoped for less than nothing.”
“She has been feeding you these lies since first you lay on her knee,” I said; “that is why you credit them.”
“You hate her, then,” she said, and her wide eyes widened further, as if to see me more clearly.
“I am past hating her. She is the riddle of my life that must be answered, that is all. Will you take me to her now? I can seek her alone, if I must, and discover her. I have got this far.”
“Indeed you have,” she said. “Come, then. Her dwelling is some hour’s journey across the island.”
We walked up the shore some way, beyond the fires, to a place where we could cross over the ocean unseen. Neither consulted the other in this, but it did not surprise me to note we were of like mind. I asked her how long the causeway kept above water, for the tide was already swelling in once more. She told me that path would be gone before we reached the island. She did not ask if it would trouble my Powers to make the whole crossing in the sorcerous way.
The sky was black, and the sea, both gemmed with stars.
I said to her, “I grew among men who thought those lights to be the eyes of gods or the lamps of spirits or the souls of dead warriors shining with their valor after death. Now I gather that the stars are only circular worlds or spheres of flame like the sun. It is a great disappointment to me.” She laughed. It was a pleasing laughter, like bright fish flashing up
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from a shadowy deep pool where one did not think they would be. “And where did you learn such stuff?” I said.
“Karrakaz was once the guest of men who knew these things to be true. That the earth is round, that it spins, and that the sun does not move.”
“No doubt she was shown the proof,” I said.
“No doubt she was.”
“Well,” I said, “she has rilled your head with fine stories.”
“Think, Zervarn,” she said softly. “The sea glides under our feet; we tread on the backs of waves. You believe that, yet you cannot believe the world is round?”
A cold wind blew from the farther shore, from the jaws of a tall silver cloud above the mountain. It blew her hair like a fire behind her. I swear I never witnessed anything more beautiful than she was, stepping over that dark ocean, darker than the sea and paler than the stars, with those wings of her hair spread upon the wind.
“If you believe it,” I said, “I will believe it.”
“Will you believe what I said of Karrakaz?”
“I will believe that you believe it, honestly. But for me, I must have her excuses from her own mouth.” After I had said that, Ressaven was silent. I wanted her to speak to me, for somehow her being there with me was hard for me to accept unless she spoke in a woman’s voice. She looked unreal, or worse, more real than anything else, rather as the fabulous ruin of the city had looked more real, as if it had stood in space before the sea or the coast or the sky were made. I did not like this effect she had on me. I had the mistress of the house yet to face, I could not afford to kneel before the slave. I said, “Inform me, at least, Ressaven, how she came here and began this breeding stock of hers.”
So, as we walked over the water, and presently up onto the long strand of the island, she talked to me of White Mountain, and of my mother. Despite myself, I hung on the words, hungry for news I had waited twenty-one years to get.
Yet I was struck immediately by the tone in which Ressaven now uttered the name of Karrakaz, with a curious kind of tenderness, and regret. It seemed the child became the mother during the narrative. Manifestly, Ressaven marveled at her witch-dam, and simultaneously she pitied her. It made me wonder suddenly to what estate the sorceress had descended, if she were failing or debilitated, or what; and if I, the questioner and the avenger, had arrived too late to snap at a crumbled bone.