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Karrakaz, lost daughter of the Lost Race, had survived, by a prodigy, a kind of prolonged catalepsy, the death that overtook her nation. She had, thereafter, journeyed through a diversity of delusions, and several hells-Ressaven was not specific-to reach a treaty with herself. During that era of struggle she had wandered the northlands; later she came to the south, and there, perhaps near Bar-Ibithni, or in Seema, she had been brought a sailor’s rumor of the western shores, their ruins, their treasure, and their fair-haired races who bore, with some frequency, albino children. It was too close an omen for her to avoid. Some forerunner of Jari, a pirate adventurer, had brought her west. Probably her voyage had been better managed than my own.
She reached the wreck of Kainium. She had seen its like before and recognized it as the building of her forebears. Once, she had experienced a terror of such spots, for she had feared the Lost and the strain of their blood in her; that hubris she had finally sloughed. With her demons conquered, she no longer feared either her race or their ruin. In a bizarre fashion she even felt a tug of nostalgia, pleasant homesickness sweep her, pacing that decay of majesty, all that remained of the places of her infancy.
The villages about stirred gradually to an awareness of her. Intuitively they sought her for healing. Shortly, she came upon a white-haired child wanted by no one. (I interrupted to ask Ressaven if this oldest and initial Lectorra were she; I was trying to catch her out. But she smiled and said, “No.” She looked almost playful for an instant, the way a girl will, veiling her origin in mystery, but, continuing, her face resumed its solemnity.) She said that from my own trouble I would understand the loneliness Karrakaz had felt, one woman, and extraneous to the clans of humanity. I refrained just then from answering with the obvious, that she had borne a son, and need not have been alone. As for the loneliness, it was no stranger to me, that gap of isolation. Karrakaz, apparently, had mastered her solitude, but, meeting the albino baby, plainly atavistic blood of her own Lost Race, she visualized irresistibly that the child would resemble her, and could be trained, if the strain of Power was accessible in it, to a similar ability. It was the last temptation, and she had succumbed.
The island of the mountain was rich then with summer. It was a garden of slender waterfalls, fields of wild flowers, wild bees, and wild vines, with everywhere the sea folding blue as
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sapphire about it. It was like the paradise of some mythus, where gods should live; unconsciously, I think, she had not been immune to her deification, though she disdained its associations. She picked, from some village, a nurse for the children, for she had been brought another child swiftly, word of her interest having flown. The nurse was a woman with a talent for babies, a peasant with no inhibitions and no offspring of her own, barren, and sore with unsatisfied maternity. Karrakaz selected others like her in the years that followed to attend the physical care of these charges. She herself, as the children grew, free as all the other wild things on the island, began to uncover in them those magic Powers that had descended to them, with their whiteness, from the Lost.
Karrakaz was not a lover of children, I had reason to know. She had few dealings with their extreme youth. But this she saw to: that they should be untrammeled by the dogma and the codes that society, in whatever form, barbaric or civilized, imposes on its creatures; that no query of theirs should be ignored; that no injustice should overcome them. She could read their minds, and did so. Frustration was a dog that never bit them. Anything that might have clogged their psychic heritage was kept at bay. Love of life, celebration of mind and flesh, the purity of unstigmatized sex and fearless meditation, this was the cornucopia she poured upon them. She gave them everything that inadvertently she had denied to me. They should have turned out better than they did.
Yet, venturing from the mountain, this free, this perfect, this brilliant, to observe the unfree, imperfect, dull and fettered world; she had not planned for that, nor the chemistry that would begin to work on them. Before, they had been only happy; now, reflected back from the gritty glass of contrast, they noticed they were gods.
Hearing Ressaven speak of it, I could only conclude that she had also followed this mirage and endured its dissolution with her demon-mother, and that she perceptively shared in the guilt of Karrakaz, her ominous sorrow and regret.
Of Ressaven herself, no hint was given in the history. I supposed she kept from me that she was also the child of the sorceress, because she was persuaded I would become hostile. It seemed she might reason I should not stumble on the truth, since we were so unalike in appearance. I considered the notion of her father, pondering if my sister had ever known him, and if she had despised him ever, as a mortal. She had men-
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tioned a purging of fires, but not where she had found them in this cushioned life.
That she had been appointed guardian to the Lectorra was apparent. I recalled the tale that Karrakaz never left her mountain.
We had reached the island shore by now, a long skirt of crystalline ice that fanned out into a pleated palisade of cliffs above, all bathed in the transparent black of night. The silver cumulus had sunk upon the mountaintop. It was how the Masrians would paint a holy mountain in a picture, its summit girdled with a band of cloud. Surely, this was a mysterious place, apt for its role.
I stood on the beach, and said to Ressaven, “What does Karrakaz avoid on the mainland? Why is she so afraid to leave this citadel, that she sends you in her stead?”
“What does she avoid? Simply her own legend, what she has become for men, despite her efforts to avert it. She did not mean to be a goddess of the western lands, nor to recreate a race of gods. But, as you see, she is a goddess and the Lectorra are gods. In the villages, here and there, they have begun to worship her and her white brood. So now she withdraws the legend, keeps herself aloof.”
Then she told me something that surprised me indeed: That Karrakaz no longer communicated directly either with the shore-folk, or with her Lectorra. A handful of them, her first chosen, still dealt with her face to face; my guide, Mazlek, was one of these few. For the rest, none of them had seen her or heard her voice in some years.
“She is deliberately making herself an enigma,” Ressaven said, “because she intends to ease herself from their minds, and ultimately, Zervarn, because she intends to leave this mountain, to abandon her Chosen to their hubris and the harsh lessons of the world. For how else are they to learn? How else is she ever to be free?” She stared at the ocean with her wide cool eyes. She said, “What was begun was foolish. She understands that now. To continue the foolishness would be a wickedness. To ignore the wickedness would be worse than wickedness. The enterprise that Karrakaz began here, out of her loneliness and her own unthinking dream, might bring back the very horror that her race engendered, and perished by. The Lost were evil, vile, debased. They could not help it, they had no fire, no measure of the soul, only this endless possibility of Power. And the Lectorra are the same. Throughout these years of her hiding and her silence, she has
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permitted no more albino children to be brought to White Mountain. Presently she will leave those that remain. They must work out their own destiny. She has harmed them enough by her nearness; now only her desertion of them is feasible.”
“Yes,” I said. “She is clever at that.”
Ressaven turned to me. “Bitter words,” she said, “yet you have come from it very well. Do you suppose these poor little gods you held in the air, blustering and weeping, will grow as heroically as you, or as strong?”
“She disgusts me,” I said. “Her schemes, her vacillations, her mistakes. Everything fits. Disorder and cruelty. Haphazard misery. That is her.”
Then I saw her anger. I had not anticipated it; her serenity misled me. Niether had I ever imagined the rage of a woman could unnerve me, but she was like no other.
“You are no longer a barbarian among the tents, Zervarn,” she said. “Do not mock a bloody sword; you carry too many In your belt.”
I mastered myself. She was only a girl, though it was hard to remember it.