The Birthgrave (27 page)

“I should get under cover, healer. These storms can last two or three days.”

“No need,” I said. “We shall be going across soon, will we not?”

His bulging eyes bulged more.

“You want to cross, too, do you? It's not usual. We leave the women behind. With a guard, of course. Old Uasti never came with us.”

“I shall be crossing,” I said.

He heard the finality in my voice, and argued no more, though I saw he did not like it.

When the things were stowed and tied down, about half of the wagon men clambered aboard the five vessels, and squatted among the coils of ropes near the stern. When I got into the fifth ship, they glanced at me uncertainly, and began to mutter a little. It came to me then that when they reached the steadings across the Water, their buyers might feast them, and provide other entertainments also. Judging by the miserable expressions of the men left behind, and the even more miserable and frustrated looks of the women, this was so. Naturally, the guests would not want their woman healer along. It did not trouble me. I felt a compulsion to cross, an almost desperate desire to reach the land beyond the river, and if they did not like it, they might choke on it.

I had taken the cat into the ship with me, but she struggled and cried, and abruptly, just as the rowers were climbing in and getting their oars ready, she scratched me, and leaped over the side onto the pebbles. There she stood quite still, staring in my face with her silver eyes, her fur on end. I felt a sense of anger and loss, and it made me aware, for the first time, that I knew I would not be coming back across the Water.

* * *

The crossing took nearly two days, during which the storm raged around us, angrily and without relief. The journey was monotonous—the endless creaking of oars and timbers, the
slupp-slupp
of the viscous water, the whistling harshness of the wind. At the midpoint of the river, when no land was visible before or behind through dust and distance, we passed by a stone block sticking some ten feet out of the blueness. It was featureless, except for the smudgy carving of the elements.

“What is that?” I asked a wagoner near to me.

He shook his head. “They call it only the Stone, healer,” he mumbled, embarrassed by my presence.

Once or twice the dark crew began a deep groaning chant-song as they strained at the oars. They spoke a different language from the wagon people, but the chant was different again, and it seemed to make no sense. I guessed it was the slurred and abbreviated version of something older.

There was no stop when night fell; the dark men rowed on. Their strength and endurance seemed strange, oddly sinister, for I was beginning to notice how blank and empty each of their faces was. They appeared almost in a trance, mindless, but I supposed their hard life had made them this way.

Late into the second day the wind dropped, and sullen clouded skies appeared. We saw the rocky rim of land we were making toward, and, in an hour, reached it. If anything, it seemed at first glance flatter and more barren than the other side beneath the Ring. A squat stone tower stood up, but that was all. Yet, once the ships were beached, we were led through a cave-mouth and down an underground slope, and emerged, minutes later, incredibly among trees.

They were thin, these trees, bent over, with twisted trunks that reminded me of the tortured rock shapes we had left behind. Black-green foliage stood high in the branches, stiff, as if carved. Beyond the trees the steading of the Dark People shambled away, enclosed on three sides by rock walls, but open to the east, where there was still a bright blue piece of the river to be seen, winding into the distance. Between the rock walls ran the thread of a stream, and on the banks of this were small patches of vegetables and grain, nourished by the water. The rest of the place was barren, except for the weird trees which stood up, here and there, among the mud-brick houses, almost like gigantic birds of prey, waiting.

Roughly in the center of the steading stood a large building, reinforced by rough blocks set in the original mud. The roof was thatched with a stringy brown material, and just under the roof were a few hacked-out slits meant for windows. Stone uprights and lintel framed the door, and toward this went Geret, Oroll, and the dark man they had spoken with earlier.

It was not a long wait. We sat in the shelter of the trees by the unloaded goods, and three women brought us clay bowls full of water or a thick yellowish milk. These women, the only ones in evidence, were thin and scrawny, dressed in black coarse cloth like their men, their hair twisted up in knots on the top of their heads, and they, too, were sullen and silent. I did not see any children, or even any dogs or goats, the usual flotsam of such a place. It was very quiet except for an occasional snake-dry rustle from the leaves. After a time, Geret and the others emerged from the large building with another dark man, very tall, and with a collar of white stones around his neck. This apparently was their king or chief. He extended his hands and spoke gutturally to us.

“You are very welcome. Tonight we will feast.”

The wagon men looked pleased. I wondered what there could be here in this unlovely spot to make them glad to stay another second in it.

Geret came over to me.

“You won't want to come to their feast,” he said. “Not fit for a woman. They're pigs, these ones, but—” He tailed off and grinned. “See the old woman over there? Go with her and she'll find you a place for the night. I'll come for you tomorrow, about sunset. We sail back then for the other shore.”

I turned and saw the old woman, incredibly wizened, toothless, and bent almost double. Fierce black eyes glared at me from the alligator flesh. Her topknot was gray.

I left Geret without a word, and, as I went toward her, she—also without a word—turned and went on ahead of me. We walked across the stream by a rough-built bridge of wood and stone, among the predatory trees, up a slope, and in at a cave opening in one of the rock walls. Again a brief passage in darkness, then a flat plateau, quite barren, covered by a huddle of mud huts. I saw several women here, and a few children; apparently they lived separately from the men.

I was taken into a vacant hut and left there, except that, from time to time, a woman or a child would come to the entrance and peer in at me.

I stayed in the hut until a murky sunset closed in on the day. I had not been sure what to do—I felt that if I moved out of the hut and began to go back through the rock passage, the women might run at me and stop me. I did not, in fact, intend to go anywhere near the stone-and-mud hall, but to walk out of this dismal oasis, and begin a crossing of the unwelcoming land, as I felt I must. I was full of expectancy, and a slight fear. I did not know quite what the irresistible pull was, but I reasoned it must be the Jade, or some place of the Jade.

And then sunset. I had heard the women about until then; now a close silence fell. I went to the hut door and looked out. Stifled red light fell in squares across the plateau. Each hut had a rough reed screen pulled over the entrance, and there were no lights. Nothing stirred. I left my hut, and crossed between the others, and no one came out, or even looked from the blind window spaces. I found the rock opening and went in, emerging slowly in the other part of the settlement. Down the slope, among the trees, across the bridge. It seemed silent here, too, very silent, and then, when I was on the other side of the stream, I began to hear the sound—a faint droning, almost like bees, a whisper-growl deep in the core of the stone-and-mud building, its door closed now with a leather curtain, under which seeped a faint orange glow.

I did not know what drew me to the curtain—only curiosity, perhaps—perhaps other things. But I went to it, half expecting to find a guard or lookout posted there, and when I found no one, I pulled the curtain an inch or so aside, and looked in.

It was a long low hall, fire pits at the far end where meat had hung—bones now. Smoke curdled up among the rough-hacked rafters, leather flaps covered the windows. The light was murky and uncertain, and the men, who lay around the sides of the hall, on skins and pelts stretched over the packed-earth floor, were indistinct, slightly moving shadows. There seemed to be a mist in the hall, more than the smoke. I could not tell wagoner from steader, but here and there, one of the Dark People crouched, boys or very young men, used, it seemed, as in the tribes, to wait on their elders. Their eyes were bright black lines in the shadow-blurred faces; their teeth showed pointed and white as the teeth of animals.

All this I saw very quickly, but then my eyes were drawn to the center of the hall, and I made out the three girls. It was the first time I had seen beauty in these dark ones. I realized now that it came early and died early, killed by the rotten living and the cruel work. They were not more than thirteen, but physically fully mature, lithe, sinuous, the full, girl-perfect breasts trembling at each flex and tremor of their limbs. Unlike the rest of their people, they wore ornaments, many-colored beads dripping down their smoky bodies, and little chips of crystal wound in their blue-black hair; otherwise they were naked. This was beautiful, but it was not all I saw. It seemed I was looking into my past, or my future, or at a painted picture, which forever changed itself, and yet retained its basic elements. In the center of them, its scales and protruding black eyes glinting in the firelight, squatted a gigantic lizard. I think I had not seen it sooner because my eyes had passed over and discarded it, unbelieving. It was the size of a large dog, of a wolf even, some sort of mutation of its kind. It had its own jeweled loveliness as the flames made glass-gleams on its armor, but its cold eyes swiveled from one dancing girl to another, and I saw then clearly the manner of their dance, sensual and inviting, and that their gestures were directed at it. Suddenly one girl slid down to her knees, then leaned backward over her own calves and feet until her hair lashed on the floor. Her thighs wide open before the lizard, she began to croon and stroke herself. It got up onto its feet, lurched toward her, and, as it came, its phallus—gigantic yet oddly human—slid from the scaled sheath. I thought the girl would shriek with pain as it pierced her, but she only moaned and sank farther backward over herself. The other girls settled around the lizard, caressing it, as the unnatural act of copulation began.

My head swam. A fire-storm of colored lights misted across my eyes and was gone. I noticed the thick, bittersweet scent in the hall for the first time. A drug. Yes, I could make out now bluish fumes that rose from the fires; but it was more than this—the unwholesome magic lay in their cups and on their food as well. I stepped back, and let the leather flap fall into place. Cool darkness and silence all around. Yet I was excited, sleepy—I had breathed the essence of their black feast. I walked back across the oasis, my limbs like lead, and pale hands reached for me, and there was the old and ancient laughter of the dead who had not died, but lived on in the corruption of all who had come later.

I began to run, along by the narrow stream, to a place where the water widened and became a pool into which a needle-bright, needle-sharp fountain jetted from a single vast rock spire. It was dark now, and the moon was in the sky. I realized I had left the rock enclosure behind, and was out on the flat empty land. Trees still stood sentinel, yet ahead there seemed nothing but that cheerless, moon-bleached desert. And then—a swift silver glitter along the side of the rock before me. With the glitter, a shifting dark, and the faint hushed sounds of animals and men moving carefully.

I saw their way past before they did, a twisting track that led under the needle-spray and by the pool. I leaned back into the shadow of one of the skeletal trees and watched them come, about forty men, each dressed entirely in black, riding black horses with muffled hooves. The moon was in cloud a moment, and when it slipped clear, I was shocked and, the drug on me, I almost cried out, for of their heads and the heads of their horses nothing seemed left but a black mane and a burnished silver skull.

It took me a moment to become rational, then I saw the masks for what they were, and knew at last what had been the model for the skull-guard of the north.

Perhaps it was logical that I should at once assume they had come to the steading—there was nowhere else, surely, they could be heading for in this waste? Yet it was more than that. I knew they had come for the wagoners, to take them—where I did not know, or why. And abruptly I was angry and afraid. I was their healer, had made myself Uasti. A responsibility for their despised lives clutched suddenly at my being.

The skulled ones had paused a moment at the pool: some of the skull-masked horses were drinking there. I slid back across the shadow, from tree to tree. It took longer than I recalled, grim and real now. At last the hall, no color left under the leather curtain. I ran to it, past it, and into the dark. There was a little spark of light—-at the far end where the roasting fires had been. I stumbled against a man: he moved, but did not seem to notice me. There were sounds and little sobs. The sexual climax of the feast had come with the dark, and no doubt more of the beauty of the Dark People was being crumpled all around me. I picked a way toward the light, and found a long cloth curtain had shielded the last fire. Beyond the curtain the light was scarlet, and here the giant lizard stared at me from the length of its iron chain. Near the fettering post sat three of the dark men and the one who seemed to be their chief and wore the collar of white stones. They had been quite still, and turned to look at me without expression. I knew their language was different, but I had heard little of it, and was still unsure. I emptied my mind and managed to find words.

“Men are coming, men with skull-masks. Against you.”

For a moment I thought they would not speak, then the chief said, “Not against us, woman. Against your kind. It was arranged.”

There was no further need of words, after all. I swung and pulled a long thin tree branch from the fire, blazing only at one end. I thrust it at them, and they jumped up and backward, a little emotion in their faces now. The lizard's eyes swiveled nervously, blinking. I turned and ran back into the hall, ripping down the curtain as I passed.