The Birthgrave (47 page)

Mazlek told me all this, swiftly, in my room.

I pulled Asren gently to his feet.

“Take him,” I said to Mazlek. “Go now, quickly. You have searched the lower reaches of the tower, you must know a hundred hiding places there; perhaps they will not find you. And if the tower falls it should be far safer.”

“And you?” he said to me.

“You know I cannot die, Mazlek,” I said. “There is no need to fear for me. Only take him now, before they come for him. I will delay Vazkor as best I can.”

Mazlek did as I told him, only Asren hung back, staring at me, but I found the mouse among the curtains and gave it to him, and at last Mazlek got him away and down the stairs.

It was a confused plan, a stupid plan. But there was so little I could do, so few ways open to me.

Vazkor did not come for a long while, he was so sure of me.

He knocked courteously at the bolted door, and when I did not answer, and the door did not give, two of his men set their shoulders to it and, after a time, they and it fell into my room. At another hour, such a sight might have been very funny. Vazkor walked into the room while they were still picking themselves up and cursing.

“Where?” he said to me. Only this one word.

I had always been afraid of him in a way, though an almost willing and sexual way, perhaps. But now I was terrified, truly and utterly.

“Where?” he said again.

“If you assume I have hidden something, why should I tell you
where
it is hidden? That rather destroys the point, does it not?”

He came across to me, and pulled me from the chair. He was unmasked and his face was white, his eyes extraordinarily black. The heat of anger can be brutal, but his cold anger was horrible; there seemed no limit to what it would do, and no act, however crucial, seemed likely to appease it.

“Tell me,” he said, “where he is.”

His eyes appeared to expand, to draw me helplessly downward. I felt weightless, floating . . . useless to resist, simple to tell him what I had done . . . Yet I, too, knew this art of Power, and I pulled free of him, a sensation so physical I seemed bruised after it.

“No, Vazkor.”

“An hour to dawn,” he said, “and then an hour after it. After that, their cannon, and the roof down over our heads.”

“It does not matter to me,” I said.

He pushed up my mask and hit me across the face, again and again. I lost count of the times he hit me. There was no pain. One of the black rings on his fingers had cut my cheek, and warm salt blood ran in at the corner of my mouth. After a while, I realized he had stopped. I sat masked in my chair, looking at him. The two men had gone and the door was closed.

“You realize, goddess, you are an ideal victim for any torture I care to devise—your healing skin will provide you with endless variations of repeatable agony. And while this is in progress, my men will search the tower thoroughly. We shall find him, whatever happens. There is no point in your suffering unnecessarily.”

I gave a little coughing laugh, for quite suddenly I was no longer afraid of him.

“You can do nothing to me,” I said. “I am your sister, you remember. I have touched my own body with fire, and have not been burned. And, Vazkor, the very fact that you require me to tell you anything proves to me you think there is some chance you may otherwise find nothing.”

He turned away from me, went to the window shutter and pulled it open. The dark sky was paling. He stood there a moment, then he turned and got me from the chair once again, and pulled me by my hand from the room and down the stairs.

I was light-headed from the beating he had given me, and, at first, what he was doing made no sense. We went deep, that same way Mazlek and I had gone. When we reached the wine cellars he did not, at first, touch the wall panel, but led me up and down the length and breadth of them all. There were signs of a recent search—his men had been violent, but too frenzied perhaps to be completely thorough. It came to me then why he had brought me here. Asren, with his child's instincts, still tied by the security he had found with me, might sense my nearness and run to me from whatever covering Mazlek had found for him. I stopped at once, but Vazkor pulled me on.

“No,” I said.

“Good,” he answered. “Talk all you want. He will find you the sooner.”

The cellars covered, he took me to the panel, and moved it. He dragged me down the steps into the narrow dismal passage beyond. I saw again the wooden door, open as we had left it, and through it, the oblong, stinking, black horror of that room. Not here—surely never here. He pulled me to the doorway, and held me there, turning his head to inspect each corner. We went inside, and he stirred the sacking with his boot. Nothing moved. We went out.

Vazkor touched the right-hand wall, brushed a series of markings with his fingers. Part of the wall groaned aside and another dark corridor lay beyond. Had Mazlek found this way? Vazkor urged me into it.

There was no light with us, yet somehow I could see. Doors lay at intervals along the passage, iron doors with little gratings, each bolted on the outside. A flight of steps led downward to a dark hollow hall. Water dripped, black flickering shadows dipped and danced on stone pillars holding up a vault of ceiling. The corrupt odor of ancient water gone rotten pressed itself into my nostrils. Ghosts clamored.

Toward the far end of the hall a pile of masonry lay in a mountain of crumbled shapes, the relics of an earlier wall. Straw was scattered there and along the floor.

We began to walk across the open space between the pillars, toward the pile. It was very quiet except for the sluggish drip of water. Our footsteps sounded sharply.

In the straw something darted from my feet, back a little way, and then sat staring at me from bright red eyes. A mouse.

My heart clenched painfully. Vazkor's hand on my arm drew me relentlessly forward.

“Past dawn now, goddess,” he said.

I willed that Asren would not recognize that sound, that familiar sound, by which he had heard Mazlek address me so often.

There was a scuttle of movement among the battered blocks of the fallen wall. Only his head emerged, the blank beautiful face almost expectant, the wide eyes searching for me.

“Asren,” Vazkor said. “Come out, Asren.”

Behind us both the swift hiss of breath, the rasp of a blade coming out of its scabbard. Vazkor whipped around, jumped sideways, and Mazlek's sword slashed lightly, cheated of its aim, across his breast. There was one second of immobility as the three of us stood in tableau. Then a kind of glitter in the air, a kind of bright flicker that might have been a trick of the eyes. Mazlek's sword clattered on the stone flags; his body leaned sideways and fell. I ran to him, but he was dead, and his skin was very cold.

On my knees still, I looked up, and saw Vazkor standing by one of the pillars, and Asren, out of the pile now, walking toward him, a puppet already, completely under his control.

“Vazkor!” I shouted.

He turned and looked at me, and, at once, as if a mechanism had been halted, Asren stopped.

“Goddess,” Vazkor said, “your interference in this matter will cease. I am going to take him above now, to a lower window in the tower, where he will speak to them.”

“No,” I said.

“Except in this matter, he is useless to me,” Vazkor said, “and so, if you prefer it, he can die now, and we will all suffer together.”

His hand moved on the pillar. There came a deep rusty screaming from under the floor, a trembling like an earthquake. Blocks slid backward into other blocks, leaving, in place of that open area we had crossed earlier, a large oval well of greenish-stippled stone. In the depths of it, water, black as oil, oozed and quivered, and was never entirely still.

“Moat water,” Vazkor said.

I shivered sickly, my hair prickling, feeling that same dread I had experienced when we rode across the bridge.

“The water is not empty,” Vazkor said. “Living things. The Warden and his men know them intimately. Asren too can come to know them, if you so desire.”

“No!” I screamed at him. I scrambled to my feet in panic.

“Goddess,” he said, “you cannot stop me.”

“My Powers,” I whispered.

“Your Powers? You think they are superior, perhaps, to my own.”

“They are the same,” I said.

“Oh, no.” He shook his head. “No, goddess. There is something you should understand, though a curious time and place in which to tell you, no doubt. There is a great difference between us and what we can command. Your Powers are intuitive, untested and unstable. My Power is learned, hardened and tried. Yes, goddess, learned. No, I am not of your Lost Race, after all. My father was a warlord of Eshkorek, a dabbler in magic. My mother came of the Dark People, a girl he raped on his way to one of the toy battles they played at in the old days. I heard of the legend early—the legend of the Power and the Second Coming. I set myself to work. He must have had some stunted ability, the man who fathered me, something which took root in me. I learned very well. By fourteen I had been hounded and stoned out of my village because of it. Men fear a magician, and when I came to the Cities, and found they looked only for a coming of goddesses, not gods, I thought my road was closed to me. Fortunately, I had enough of my father's looks to pass as a citizen, despite my darkness. I enlisted in the armies of the Javhovor of Ezlann, and, by dint of apparent courage, and also by bribery and intrigue, I became at last High Commander. And then, goddess, you were found for me.”

My brain hummed; I felt in me a terrible stirring. He had thought to silence me forever because he had built himself from clay, and I was still unformed. But he had forgotten the hubris which had grown in me, the ancient contempt for humanity which he himself had helped to foster. White-hot lava began to bubble in my veins, my face set like a cold white stone, so that I drew off the lynx mask and felt no nakedness, only the sense that I could create fear. And I saw him flinch, very slightly, as he had that first time he saw my face.

“Vazkor,” I said, “you are a
human man.”

“I have still deceived you very well. In Ezlann, when you were sick and I set the blame on Asren, you did not believe me. Yet did you not think your illness very opportune? I sent you that illness to serve my purpose, and you did not guess it, I think. And the balcony, do you remember that, when I controlled your movements and your mind as easily as I can this creature who was Asren?”

I sensed the scrabbling behind his level voice, the hands clinging onto the rocks, and the drop below. I scarcely heard what he said.

“Vazkor,” I repeated, “you are a human man. You can die.”

“You forget what Asren told you, goddess. There was an assassin who stabbed me mortally and I survived.”

“Because you willed it,” I said.

“And I shall cease wanting life?”

“Yes, when you can no longer order it.”

I saw the fire leap from his pupils, clear this time, and very bright, and the deep fury answered from the core of my brain. A shaft shot out, blazing, and caught his little death-wish for me, and contained it, and turned it. I seemed much larger than Vazkor, taller, burning. I felt his Power shrivel and draw back, and I pressed after it, pursuing it into the very brain-cave of its lair, into the dark places of Vazkor's mind. And there I found the diamond spark of his knowledge, down the black corridors of the skull, which in most of mankind are closed and empty, but which in Vazkor were open and alive. I found the spark, the little hard, bright stone, and I scorched it to ashes, destroyed it without compunction, because he had claimed he was my brother, and was only a man.

I drew back. The light faded. I felt small and empty and afraid. By the pillar Vazkor stood, and I saw what I had done to him. I called out his name, but he only stared at me. His eyes flickered, as the blinded inner eye swiveled desperately to each of those doors of ability I had closed forever. As he had killed that part of Asren's brain which made him a thinking man, so I had killed that part of Vazkor's which made him a magician, and a god. The Power in him was dead.

I do not know if he was aware of what he did. He took several steps backward, and the last unbalanced him over the lip of the black moat pool. Hardly a splash, the water was so thick and turgid. And then a little dazzling movement all around him, as though the water itself were running to welcome a guest.

Vazkor screamed. The water reddened, sparkled. Vazkor screamed.

I put my hands over my ears and turned away, and began to scream also.

Silence came, only the drip of the water sounded. The liquid of the pool was black, and empty.

“Asren,” I called softly, “we are safe now.”

I was weeping and could not see properly. I found the lynx mask, and put it on, and stumbled across the straw toward him. The noise had terrified him. I put my arms around him, and rocked him gently in the dark.

* * *

The cannon began quite suddenly. I had forgotten them.

At first the noise seemed far away, thunder beyond the hills. Soon other noises came, bursting and tearing sounds, the thud of rooms collapsing above.

Smoke drifted through to us, and a dull red light. There were great cracks spreading on the vault above. At the far end of the hall, a pillar split slowly from end to end, buckled and collapsed. The gray avalanche gushed through.

Asren whimpered. I pressed his head to my breast, leaned over him as best I could, sheltering him with my body.

A great roaring came swooping to us like a bird of prey. For the first time I felt terror as the ceiling sagged and broke above me. Delicate little pieces scattered like a fine rain, and then the slabs broke away from the flooring overhead.

There was no more time to be afraid.

1

T
HERE HAD BEEN
blackness, and in the blackness: nothing. Now, still closed in the dark, I began to hear a single sound, rhythmically repetitive, a tireless engine lifting, sinking, in-drawing, expelling. Quite suddenly I had begun to breathe again.

My eyes opened a little on a cool, dim, greenish light. I thought it was the Jade, and was too weak to reach and touch it. I did not know where I was or remember what had happened. Again, I lay under a mountain, awaiting birth; the sequences had become mixed and inseparable.

Yet the light was not green at all, clearing now, whitening. A little thud, and dust drifts dancing. I heard shouts and then a rattle of stone stuff coming down. Dust clouded gray, cleared, and showed a great gap ahead of me, full of the whitish light, except where it was full of the silhouette of a man, leaning forward to me faceless. He gave a muffled exclamation, but the tongue was new to me, and it made no sense at this moment. A hand came groping toward my face, fastened on the silver mask.

“Do not,” I said.

I used the City speech, could recollect nothing else to use. He did not understand, but his hand snatched back from me, and he cried out in surprise. He had thought me dead, no doubt.

He turned and wriggled from the hole they had made, and shouted to others. After a moment strong hands had a hold on my ankles and calves, and I was pulled unceremoniously out of my grave into the harsh searing brilliance of day. I had enough strength to get one arm up to shield my blinded watering eyes, and, in this position, I lay for their inspection, my stained and ripped mantle of yellow Eshkorek velvet rucked up about my thighs, and under that the filthy streamers which had once been fine silken undergarments.

After a while, one of them laughed—I did not particularly blame him—and observed something to the others. This time I seemed able to grasp—not what he said, but the tongue he used. It was new to me, quite new, and yet a far-off echo sounded, something I recognized. . . . I lifted my arm a fraction, and stared up at three men. They wore wool leggings of dull reds and yellows, and leather belts and boots. To the waist they went naked except for armless leather jackets, and their brown, hard bodies were vivid with tattoos of many colors, and scars of many shapes. Tribesmen, speaking a language different from, yet with a tenuous kinship to, the tongue of the Plains. Against the assault of the blazing sky, I struggled to see faces, lean and set, long grim mouths, wide-spaced eyes a salty blue. Their hair, more than blond, was reddish, and not bound in clubs or cut short, but woven into five or more thick plaits behind the ears, held out of the eyes by a circular strip of painted cloth stretched around the head.

I was very confused still, but this new awakening was beginning to make sense. I lolled my head a little, and made out other, similarly adorned males, going to and fro among the wreckage of the fallen tower. Looters, not rescuers. What had I expected? And if they had come so far in order to glory in this collapse of a piece of City power, they would have no time for a woman of that City, half-dead and apparently worth nothing. They would strip my rings and the silver mask, for these were all part of the tower pickings, and then they would ride off and leave me to my fate, or else, perhaps, run a spear through me to help me to it. Unless, of course, they had a fancy for a high-born slave.

They were talking again, and I forced myself to hear what they said. This time the pattern came clear and strong, and I found I could speak it at last. They were discussing their holy man, or seer, who had apparently foretold the fall of Tower-Eshkorek, and insisted they ride to it, declaring they would find something precious here. Precious? What other secrets had there been, then? I had no time for speculation. I took the cue luck had given me. They respected religion and magic, it seemed, and dimly I remembered now that Mazlek had mentioned their continual wars.

“I am the precious thing your seer spoke of,” I broke in, and their faces dipped to me, startled. “I am a magicianess of great power, a healer and prophetess. I will help you in your battles, intercede for you with your gods.”

It was a ridiculous announcement for a woman lying on her back, her hair matted with dust and filth, and her torn skirts around her waist. Yet they took it from me, with the naïveté of savage men to whom all things are simple, or else extraordinary and great. And I had used their language. How could I know it if I were not what I said?

“Of Eshkir,” one said, using the tribal name for Eshkorek Arnor.

“No,” I said. “And what I am, or where I came from, is of no concern to you. Your wise man told you. Is that not enough?”

The third of them, who had said nothing all this time, leaned forward abruptly and picked me up. He was strong and it seemed easy for him. He did not carry me elegantly across his body, as a City man would have done, but over his shoulder, like a kill, and I thought of the wagon people.

I could see now that the tower, in falling, had filled up one side of the moat, making a bridge for them to cross by.

Things grew blurred, and somehow rather amusing. I was put facedown over a shaggy brown horse, which liked this state of affairs as little as I, and shifted discontentedly, so that my nose was banged with an infuriating rhythm against the rough horse blanket on its back. As I lay like this, their seeress as untidily placed as before, the tribal men gathered themselves together, and presumably discussed matters. After a while of discomfort, dull heat, and nose-banging, my champion mounted himself behind me, and, with some jerks and bumps, we set off. My mind was closed to everything except the humor and indignity of my situation, and I laughed.

And so that is the way I left Tower-Eshkorek, head down over a horse, laughing.

* * *

I recollect little of the journey, only waking occasionally to catch glimpses, from the tail of my eye, of a round bluish moon. It seems they made no halt when night came on; they knew their road from the mountains very well. From time to time snatches of their brief conversations sounded through my dozing, but again I could not seem to understand. That did not trouble me much at the time. There were dreams, too, about the things that were past, though it was not for some days that I remembered how the tower had fallen in a close cradle over our heads, a trap, but one which held the rest of the rubble away from us. There was no air in that place, and gradually the murky soporific of death crept in. Asren had not been afraid, and of that I was very glad. He lay in my arms quietly, and long after he was dead, I held him as I waited. I had not thought anyone would ever come to bring me new air so I could breathe again, and had not greatly cared. Yet these warriors, sent by their seer, had opened a way.

It was a long journey for them to come. I reckoned later it took three days or more for the return.

There was a halt or two. Once I was offered food, but I did not want it, and could not have eaten it, in any case, without raising the lynx mask.

How long had I lain under the tower? They would not have come immediately—not until the soldiers had gone. At one point I thought of the child, wondered if it were dead in the womb, and, if it were not, how it liked my position over the horse. The warriors had had scant respect for a swelling pregnancy. But I had not thought of it before.

Fourth day? Morning changing the sky as I cricked my neck trying to see it. A great deal of jolting, and I realized that we were working a way down from the mountain slopes; just a glimpse of their sun-painted terraces behind me. I was too fully conscious now to bear my comfortless position.

“Let me up,” I called, and the warrior whose horse carried me grunted. It occurred to me I had spoken in the City tongue. I corrected myself clumsily, struggling with the new words. “Let me move—let me ride with you.”

The man laughed nastily. I became aware no mere woman would be allowed to sit a horse, let alone a horse with a warrior already on it.

“Then let me down,” I said. “I will walk.”

He consulted his neighbors, a taciturn dialogue. After a moment we halted and I was pulled off. One of them tied a rope around my waist, and attached it to “my” warrior's saddle horn.

“This is not needed,” I said. “I shall not run away. I come freely to your tribe to be seeress and healer.” Their faces were blank, and I broke off, conscious of having slipped back again into City speech, and of waving my arms and hands in pointless gesticulation, as I have seen people do when they cannot express themselves properly in an alien language. Abruptly I wondered if I had managed it as well as I judged at the tower; had I imagined their apparent acceptance?

With a jerk at my tether, the horse began to move, and I began to move after, of necessity.

I thought at first it was a lucky place to have chosen, for we were on the last of those slopes, and the way grew easier by the minute. I was glad to be walking, even roped as I was, even though my legs felt weak and occasionally buckled unexpectedly at the knees, and even though court sandals are not made to stumble in over jagged holes and boulders, and I stubbed each toe a thousand times. We were going down into a valley of rocky turbulent shapes, clustered with stands of thorn, thin pines, and other dark slender trees. The valley was full of velour shadows, but the sky overhead was golden-green, still streaked with red fingers of cloud. I was far from happy as I looked at it; how could I be happy? Yet a sort of calm seemed to flow into me, inhaled like a drug of forgetfulness from the cool air.

And then, feeling better ground under them, my escort kicked at their shaggy horses, mine included, and broke into a gallop. I tried to run with them, but I had no hope. The rags of my dress caught my feet, and in an instant the rope snapped taut, and I was pulled down. Dust in my eyes and nostrils, grazed by every stony upthrust, torn by sharp rocks, I was dragged helplessly forward, practically strangled by the cord at my waist. This is what the charioteer goes in fear of, if he has room for fear, one of those deaths the Sagare can offer. My left arm across my breasts in an instinctive protection, I tried to claw the rope free of me with the other. No use. I screamed for them to stop. No use.

Suddenly the way was smoother. More dust. Incongruously I twisted to avoid a heap of goat dung, and was hauled through a broken bush tuft instead. My journey came to an end.

I lay there on my face for a moment, and then crawled to my knees. Around the makeshift track was a scattering of dark blue tents among the tall pines. Ahead, a larger tent, painted yellow on the blue, and before it a big fire-pit, smoking, and only just alight from the labors of four shireen-masked women in black sleeveless garments. They had stopped work to stare at me. One of the warriors gave a yell at them and they ran like terrified hens, into the trees and out of sight.

We had come to this place around a jut of rock, which hid it well from the roll of the slopes. They had otherwise no stockade, yet this was a krarl, though not large—about twenty tents in all.

The dust was still settling, the warriors riding circles, our horses still snorting and agitated from the gallop, when two men emerged from the painted tent, one before the other. The first was a very big man, yet with not enough stature for his girth, heavily muscled, and with a hint of fat to come from many jugs of tribal beer. His large blue eyes were pouchy, stupid—and yet cunning, too; and in addition to red plaited hair, he wore a full beard, well greased and plaited also. This beard dressing must be an irksome thing to him, and, from the look of it, it was most probably performed not more than three times a year, the last session being long past. He was unmistakably a chieftain, and he swaggered as he came, very sure of his ground. Dressed as his warriors in leather jacket, leggings, and boots, he wore many collars and trinkets over his tattoos, armbands of burnished copper, and there were tassels swaying from his belt. The other, who came behind him, was a different thing again. Thin, tall, covered by a long brown robe caught at the waist in a leather thong, his hair unbound and fiery-colored yet streaked with gray, his face shaved like the faces of the warriors but painted black, so that it seemed he, too, went masked. Wild pale eyes rolled around in that black face, which, despite the gray hair, looked of indeterminate age, and he clutched at a wooden shape hanging on his chest. Their seer?

Arms went up in salute. The gaudy chieftain nodded and looked at me.

“What is this?” I heard him say through the throbbing of my blood.

“An Eshkir, from the tower, Ettook,” one of them said, and then laughed. “A seeress, she said. The precious thing Seel sent us to find.”

The holy man Seel moved around Ettook the chief, and came toward me. I wanted to get up to face him, but I could not seem to manage it, and, as I kneeled there, I struggled to find words instead.

“I am a magicianess,” I said; but I had used the City tongue.

Seel came very close, and I smelled the stink of his body, the stench of skin forever wrapped up in a covering, and never exposed to sun or air or water. He seemed angry, his dry hands knotting and unknotting, his sharp yellowish fangs bared in a grin of hatred for me. His eyes glittered and darted. Suddenly he spat into my masked face. He shrieked some words I could not understand, and broke into a hopping dance. He leaped away from me, and, still screaming, he ran to each warrior in turn, poking at them with bony fingers. The warriors seemed afraid and backed away. I could not properly follow, but it appeared I was not what he had wanted brought; there had been some other thing—and they had missed it.

Again I felt I might begin to laugh, despite the pain I was in. And yet I must deal with them now, these tribal savages, or else I was lost. I made myself think of how they had dragged me those last yards over the ragged ground, of how the seer had spat in my face. Anger came, hot and bright, and filled me like a jar. I got to my feet.