Westgate that opened out on to the familiar streets of Sanctuary that she paused
for breath and turned to meet her daughter’s wide eyes.
‘Vanda, you are a woman now, old enough to take care of the younger ones if you
must, and old enough, perhaps, to understand. If this works, you must promise
never to tell your father what I have done for him.’
‘And if it doesn’t?’ Vanda said in a very small voice.
Gilla gazed at the teeming life around her, sunlight glaring harshly off browned
faces, sounds of quarrelling and laughter, the rich mixture of odours from the
street, and for a moment felt as if she had lost her skin and had become a part
of all of these.
‘I have borne seven children and seen two die, and lived with the same contrary
man for twenty-six years,’ she said slowly, ‘and I have just realized that I
would sacrifice this whole city for one lock of his hair. If this stuff I am
going to give him kills him,’ she shook the hand in which the crystal vial lay
hidden, ‘I’m sorry, Vanda, but I will go after him.’
Lalo the god was creating a woman, a goddess as beautiful as Eshi, as bountiful
as Shipri, as wise as Sabellia, as dear to him as someone – he could not
remember, but the brush splashed gold like sunlight across Her hair. There, the
ripeness of breasts that could feed a dozen babes, and the opulence of haunch
and thigh, and skin smoother than the silk of Sihan … Lalo smiled, and the
brush moved as if of itself to suffuse that white flesh with a rosy glow like
the inside of a shell.
And then he stepped back from the easel, smiling, and the figure he had been