When I raised my head, my eyes burning and my mind tender from the beating it had got, there was a desert in me, as if the cities of my character had crumbled. For the truths I had sketched for myself so glibly were riveted now upon the wall.
“My thanks for your account,” I said to the veiled figure who sat quiet as a stone before me. “I will decide some other day how I am to swallow it. But I admit that if you have wronged me, you also have been wronged. There is an emptiness between us, lady. That is the sum of it.”
“Then you will leave here without rancor. And without profitless delay.”
“If you wish. But, lady, have you never been curious about me? Did you imagine me dead, or what?”
“For some while I sensed your approach to this place, your search for me. I never realized you would achieve such Power. You are all any mother would desire of her son, a prince among men. And for a sorceress, what better son than a master-sorcerer? But it is too late for kinship.”
Her un-voice was melancholy in my skull. I understood she had not spoken with her lips at any time.
I said aloud, “But I have never seen your face. Even in those psychic visions of your past, I never saw it.”
“Lellih showed you a face,” she said. Then she had read my brain, though I had not essayed hers. No matter. I felt no menace from her, no seeking to undermine me.
“A cat’s face, a hag’s face. Not yours, surely. Lady,” I said, and my throat dried so I mumbled like an old man, “let me look at you once, and I will leave you.”
She did not answer. I waited. She did not answer still.
It was not the fury of a god or the petulance of the child whose parent denies him, it was my tribal upbringing, which would not let me be cheated of my bargain.
She was the goddess Karrakaz, but she was not in that moment quick enough for me. I sent my Power like a gust of winter wind to lift her veiling off her body and her face and cast it aside.
Karrakaz had sat as immobile as a stone, and small surprise. She was a stone. The image of a seated woman made of a pale polished marble, dressed in woman’s garments,
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veiled and fixed in the ivory chair. I had all this while been entreating from a statue. What had hoaxed the mainland folk had made a clod also of me.
What went through me I can hardly say. I was angry, but not hot or from my wits. For the mind-voice of Karrakaz, which could not he any other’s but her own, had come from somewhere near.
I did not take a step either way, but I filled my lungs and I shouted, “Where is she? Let her come out. I am done with jokes. There will be death and hell let loose on this mountain if there is one more game played against me. Where is the sorceress?”
“She is here,” a woman said at my back. The voice was flesh and blood. It said, “I did not mean to lay this heaviness on you, Zervarn. I intended only to fathom what you were, to draw you, if I could, to an acceptance of me, not as a myth and a vileness, but as a living creature. I loved you from the first; how could I not? You are Vazkor’s image, Vazkor that I loved, and very like another, too, a man I knew as Darak. … In some strange fashion you also resembled him, as if his seed had lingered in me to help form you. More than these, in you I beheld myself, not the albino Lectorra of the westlands, but a full-fledged magician, a man of my own race born again through me. I did not recognize what the rest should be, but it was some fate on us. And you have lived sufficiently as a mortal and by mortal codes that this will trouble you and make you afraid. I tried, how hard I tried, you remember, deceit on deceit, to keep you from this knowledge. If only you had been obedient in a single thing, you could have gone from here without a weight upon your shoulders.”
I recognized the voice and had no necessity to turn, but turn I did, and found her there close enough to take once more in my arms.
“I used my mother’s name, in the beginning, to deceive you. The younger Lectorra know me only by that name, and the shore people, for long since I expunged my physical memory from their brains, so they should not cry after me as the goddess I was not. Mazlek, Sollor, Denarl, they know me and who I am, and would have saved you this, as I would.”
I went on staring down at her, but I had grown sightless.
I should have reasoned other things before. That the self renewing flesh of the Lost Ones, which defied blemish or scar, would neither age nor wither. That forty years or more would
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not therefore mar her skin or body, that she could look nineteen, and did. I should have read her eyes, the likeness between us, her holding off from me, her weeping.
My Ressavan. Not my sister. This woman I had loved, this woman I had lain with, was Karrakaz. My mother.
She predicted for me accurately. I had been too long with men to forswear their codes. A sister half my blood was a minor thing to this. In the kiln that had formed me, I had stayed my own appetite. The serpent gnawed upon its own tail.
My manhood shriveled. It seemed to me then that never again could I lie on a woman without the ghost of this speaking its clammy incantation in my loins to make a eunuch of me. It seemed, too, that never again could I walk among the clans of men but that the brand would glare from my forehead. Maybe I had been marked for this from the beginning, for it had come to me suddenly how Chula had railed against me that I lay on Tathra, that perhaps Chula’s dirty mouth had been, in that moment, an instrument of prognostication.
This, then, was the gift the sorceress had laid by for me, this atrocity. She had not meant it, no, but she had foreseen. I had wandered in ignorance into the trap.
I left her, and her mountain in the sea. I said no word to her, could not bring myself to exchange words. I ran from that place with no pride, and no capacity for anything.
I did not walk over the ocean to the shore, but attempted to swim and partially drowned myself, and crawled on the land to spew up salt water, trying to spew up my anguish with it.
In these fevered actions I strove to bury the most terrible despair of all. For many months I strove to bury it. She had never been mother to me, would never be. Tathra was my mother, and Karrakaz my enemy once. And now, only a woman. A beautiful woman, world’s end, life’s heart, those phrases one brings out that never touch the burning certainty within that has no use for phrases. I loved her yet. That was the rock on my back, the felon’s mark on my brow. I loved her, my sin and my shame.
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3
I went inland and traveled about the towns and cities of the west. Sometimes I healed the sick, but privately. I accumulated no tags of god or wizard; what I did I did from pity, to relieve my guilt, as Gyest had prophesied I would. I could have been thankful for Gyest to talk with in those red-roofed cities. I do not recollect any meetings of note. I had a woman in some town there, who ran after me up the road for three miles. I was still man enough for that sort of trouble after all, despite the burden of my incest.
I never had a single dream of Vazkor. That dark shadow had entirely gone from my side. Shadowfire, the reflection of the flames upon the wall; how little I had anticipated the fire itself.
Of her I never thought. My mind was closed to her. My musings were only of the dark venture we had shared. Here was the strangest part of it, for while the sense of the sin nauseated me, yet I could not, even now, equate her with the sin.
It was the abstract nature of the world that brought her back to me. The sound of waves breaking on a clear cold shore, the moon coming up through a cloud of trees, the silver bird that cries for dawn, the spring, which was flowing over the land at last.