The Birthgrave (5 page)

“Of course, your holy mask. Then take it off.”

“No one must see my face. Do you not recall that, Darak?”

My voice, so cold and clear, was the last of my strength. I was weakening now, frightened and angry and bewildered. The stench of food and drink came all around me, and there seemed no escape.

“We're not afraid,
goddess.”
He stopped looking at me to peel a fruit. For all his lounging here, he was not a man who liked to be still. I wished him dead, but not hard enough. “Come, goddess. We can tell what you've got to hide. You're albino—white hair, white face. Eyes too—although the mask holes throw a good shadow over them, there's no color. So. No more pretense. Sit and eat.”

He gave a little nod of his head; I almost did not see. But the big brute behind me giggled like a child, and the fingertips brushed my hair, coming for the hooks of the mask.

No, by all of my lost soul. They should not have my shame as a present in their stinking den.

I ducked under his hand, spinning around. My foot, the long toes clenched inward like a fist, kicked up and jabbed home in his groin. No compunction. I had seen what these things, half animal, used their genitals for, beyond the true purpose, and I was arrogant still with a raw and uncompassionate arrogance. He yelped and doubled and fell over, and I knew I had done enough to him.

I turned back to Darak, and he looked surprised.

“Well,” he said, and stopped.

I grasped the second before it was too late, to throw him now while he was unbalanced in front of his horde.

“You are the leader of these people,” I said to him, “and you have a right as such. I will show you what no other man may look on. Privately. Then you can judge for yourself.”

I felt sick when I had said it, sick and sad, and ashamed already. But I knew what must be done.

After a moment he grinned.

“An honor, goddess, to be shown privately what no other may look on.”

Some of them guffawed, and made their various absurd children's jokes about the sexual act.

One leaned to Darak and said urgently: “Let some of us come with you. Don't trust the bitch.”

Darak rose and stretched. The big muscles cracked and slid under his bronze skin.

“The day Darak is afraid to go into the trees with a girl, you can get yourselves a new leader.”

He came over to me, got my wrist, and took me out of the courtyard, taking great strides so that I stumbled and had to run to keep up. They laughed behind us, all except the man I had kicked, who was groaning and weeping on the ground.

* * *

We came into the terrible dead land near the lake. Great stretches of burned trees, brittle but still standing, where the night wind snapped twigs, and blew off a fine black powder in our faces. Only the water seemed clean. A moon was rising, red, and blurred at one edge as it melted into its wane.

In a way I was surprised he had not pushed me over and had me as soon as we came into the terrible trees. He was a hot hardness beside me, a little afraid without properly knowing it, sexually excited, I sensed. He still had my wrist, and now I pulled away.

“Is here far enough for the goddess?” he asked with stinging politeness. I wondered if he would ask next, equally biting and conscientious, should he spread his cloak for me?

“No,” I said, “a little farther. There is a place for all things, and this is not that place.”

I went on ahead now, toward the shore. I recalled the great sharp stones I had seen lying there.

My feet in the cinders, the water ahead of me, I said to him: “Look around us. Make sure there is no one here.”

“You look, goddess,” he said. “Your immortal eyes should be better than mine.”

So I looked. Then I crouched down, beckoned him to do likewise, spreading my hand as if to steady myself, and finding, without my eyes, a stone so perfect I might have planted it here purposely. My right hand was on the hook of the mask, and he watched, fascinated despite himself, the old rotten superstition overcoming him again. He was breathing fast, his eyes on mine, and my left hand jumped forward and the stone struck him on the forehead near the temple. It should have been a blow hard enough to kill, but perhaps I was off-balance myself, as I had made sure he should be; and besides, he knew in the last instant, and tried to throw himself aside, and he was very quick and strong. In any case, it was hard for me to kill Darak, and he meant more to me than my anger would let me know.

So the blow was a bad one. It stunned him and did not kill, and he fell sideways, and his lashes were very long on his high cheekbones, and I got up and ran from him, in every sense like a hunted cat, scrambling, into the dark.

* * *

But somehow the stone was still in my left hand. I could not seem to let go of it, and this slowed me. I was uncertain why I clung to it, but I think I knew he would come after me, and then I must defend myself again. And so it seems I slowed myself by holding it, so he could catch up to me, at the same instant ready to fight him when he did.

This double impulse clouded my mind, and worse, my hunger was on me like a beast. Weak-kneed and light-headed, I found at last I was stumbling along not far from the water's edge, making back toward the volcano. Once I realized this I checked, panting, turned to the side, and tried to scale the slope there. I should be well away from the village by now. But the cinders and loose topsoil and shale gave under my feet. I slipped and slithered, clawing with my free hand, making so much noise I did not hear the steps behind until it was almost too late. When I heard, I turned, and he was there.

“Come here, damn you!”

His voice slit the night wind. I lost my foothold, letting go the hard-won ground, and fell back, grazed and breathless, a few feet away from him. The bruise was rising like an angry star on his forehead, and his eyes were black with fury. He staggered on his feet, still concussed, but I had done him little damage all in all. He cursed me, some curse of his hill-men I did not recognize except in essence, and then he came at me, and I was on my feet, the stone grasped in my left hand, the sharpest end toward him. He stopped still a moment, coughing a little from the run we had had through the cinder dust; then his hand, too, was no longer empty. It was a wicked-looking knife, thin but strong, with metal bits welded on and sticking out like thorns from the middle of the blade.

We moved around each other, both nervous, at a loss, each again half in the other's power. And then he recalled that he was Darak, and a man, and that I—mere woman—was something to be conquered and beaten down and back into my eternal submission, not worthy of his knife, and he swung at me with his other arm, and his empty hand struck me across ribs and belly, and that was that.

I lay under the reeling black sky that circled on its crow's wings closer and closer, the stone a million miles from my hands, and my hands a million miles from my brain.

I remembered enough to shut my eyes as he pulled the mask of the She-One from my face.

Time passed.

I opened my eyes at last, and I think I had lost hold of consciousness a few seconds, for he was sitting some way off, his back half-turned to me, and I had not heard him leave me, or felt him drop the mask onto my breasts.

He was breathing deeply. I could not see his face properly to read it. I turned my head toward the stone, and it lay so near to me now, I thought it must have moved itself. Then it changed, and was the knife that Karrakaz had shown me, the knife that would always be there for me, so I might end my life. And I knew I could tell it to strike into me, and it would; and death would be a comfort. But my lips were stiff and my mouth was full of dust. I could not call to it.

Then he said: “This village has always made me angry. I only remember the beatings I got here as a child, but I always come again to take the fresh blows on my back. So I came again and tried to help them, and they called to you and invoked your name. Let them go, then.”

After that he was quiet for a little while. The wind stirred the lake softly, and the cinders with a sound of dry leaves.

“You,” he said eventually. “I don't know what you are—a human perhaps, but not of this race. Not of man or woman. Not even of beast. Yes. A goddess, perhaps.”

I put the hooks of the mask behind my ears. The jade I had hung around my neck lay in an icy drop over my heart. I got up and turned away, and began to walk toward the flatter land beside the lake, where I could climb free, and go where I wished.

When he called to me, I wanted to turn and would not, and when again he called, I did not want to, and I did.

He stood some yards from me, and said, “Leave the village. Come into the hills with us. I'd like to deprive them of you, the mewling fools. You can heal, I know it. Heal my people. I'll see you're fed, and clothed—better than that.”

In his face there was a sort of fear, and it was his own fear that fascinated him. He wanted to explore it, not run from it. I saw the great strength in him then, a man who could look into himself, and look again and again.

And he had looked into my face—my hideousness.

And I loved him with my body, without much hope or much demand in me; and I despised him, and I knew that he would trap me, and there could be no true mating between us, of flesh, of thought, or of soul.

And I knew I would go with him.

1

O
N THE SECOND
day into the hills, the mountain was a shadow, left behind. On the third, over many slopes, I could no longer look back and see it.

This was a strange open land, high up and near the sky. The hills rolled, tangy-brown, patched with purple gorse and blood-red flowers. Outcrops of rock showed like ancient bones pushed through the soil, and in the skull-holes of caves things stirred—bears, foxes—making their stores ready for the lean months. It was late summer. Already the sap was burning out of the year.

* * *

Darak's band was not a large one—about twenty men. The main camp lay ahead in the hill's heart. A few village boys had run away with us, anxious to leave the fields for easy pickings on the wide road and cart-tracks south. The men rode shaggy hill ponies, small barrel-chested mounts, hung all over with tassels, bells, gold coins, and lucky charms. The women had a couple of mules between them, and sometimes rode pillion with their particular bandit. Darak rode a black horse, fine and hot-tempered, unsuitable for the climbing, that shied every time a bird rose from a thicket. He went on something different, I thought, when it was a matter of business.

As a woman, I should have walked. As a witch, I had my own mule, brought from some village stable. The red tunic of the goddess was gone, and the goddess' white mask. I wore dark stuff now, and a face covering—the shireen Darak had seen among women of the plains tribes, whose faces must be hidden from puberty. Across forehead and eyes the cloth was close fitting, with narrow eye-holes decorated by their own raised upper lids, which cast a shadow over the eyes themselves. From the cheeks, over the nose and mouth and chin, hung a loose veil of the same material. A woman in the village had stitched it for Darak.

When I had ridden out with them, the villagers had stood in the streets, among the rubble, staring at me, sullen, and afraid that going I took something from them. Darak grinned, riding his black devil horse. A few women plucked at me, crying. I hardly understood them, my ears closed to their village tongue. They were nothing to me, but what then was Darak's hill camp? There was a weight of iron in my belly, but it lifted as we left the lake and the volcano behind.

He had not spoken to me since the night on the cinder-slope. All his words had come secondhand, from the mouths of others: “Darak says you are to have this,” “Darak has told me to tell you.”

At night, when he made camp, leather tents went up, painted with five or six colors. One of these was given to me, and here I could be as private as I wished. I ate a little when I must, and the pains grew easier, but never failed to come. The quietest of the bandit girls brought me the food and whatever other comforts Darak thought I might need. She said nothing, but her eyes darted, bright and black, like two agate wasps set in her head.

On the dawn of the fourth day, a man came with a snakebite, his arm swollen and black. He swaggered in through the tent flap, anxious to be cured without losing the arm, anxious, too, to show he set no store by me. If I did him good, that was an accident of his fortune. He was at pains to tell me what he had been at when the snake got him, which was squatting among the rocks relieving himself.

I touched the swollen flesh and looked in his face. He had no blind belief to take the healing from me, as they had in the village.

“I cannot help you,” I said.

He was sweating, and in pain, but he glared at me and lifted his good hand as if to cuff me; then thought better of it.

“You're the healer. That's why Darak brought you. So heal me, you bitch.”

A small door opened in my mind. I recalled something, but not much.

I drew his knife out of his belt, and he flinched nervously. I took it and dipped it in the flames of the little brazier the girl brought me at night. I got his arm again.

“Hold still,” I said, and made the quick incision before he could protest. He roared like a bull. “Now suck,” I said, “suck and spit.”

He sat with his mouth wide open, amazed at my abrupt movement and the order—crude in its basic simplicity.

“Do as I say,” I added, “before the whole of your body swells up and blackens too.”

That galvanized him into activity. Kneeling in my tent, he set to work with frantic, wide-eyed speed.

In the middle of this, Darak's hand pulled the tent-flap wide, and he looked in. He had avoided me till now, and today had been away early, hunting; what had brought him here, I did not know. He stared in amazement for a moment at the rhythmically swaying, sucking, spitting bandit before me, then laughed.

“Some new ritual to the goddess,” he said, and went away.

The man cured himself, but it was mere luck.

* * *

The day after that, the hills were at their highest and most barren, the soil eroded, the bare rock flanks lying like great tortoises in the sun.

A group of tall trees, elegant and thin as some women can be, stood ahead of us. Foliage rested like black ribbon clouds on their tops, and at intervals in the upper branches. At sunset we began to climb toward these trees, up a flight of natural steps, the broad terraces of the hill. I knew from their urgings, jokes, and different manner all around, that we were almost in the camp now, but I could not tell where it might be. The horses' small sure feet beat under us like little clocks. Even Darak's horse was quieter, better and more stable, as it sensed its home. Overhead the red sky was purpling, and the stars were coming through. One fell, beyond the hills it seemed, into the plains there, with a train of golden fire. A bandit girl pointed to it, calling to us to look, but it was gone. I knew enough of their old beliefs—not only from their stories, but from the way they spoke of many things. Men who had not feared the She-One had been reared on other milk, and feared instead the earthshaking serpent, or the grave of murderers. There were terrors in all of them, however well they plastered them over with experience and boasting. The falling star had perhaps been, to the bandit girl, a god, visiting from his sky-house. To another of them it was a warrior's death as he fell in battle.

Already I knew them a little. A sort of kinship had linked me to them beyond what linked me to Darak, even though I was not of them, and their ways disgusted me. Even he, the one I followed here, was their clay, not mine.

A crack of thunder split the sky across. Darak's horse reared and plunged, its feet kicking loose stones downward to the lower slopes. A blazing dry wind tore by us and was gone, but away behind us the sky was suddenly scarlet and alive.

“Makkatt!” one of the men shouted. It was their name for the volcano.

We turned in our saddles on the uneasy horses, and stared back to the light in the sky.

One of the village boys, who had come with us, began to yell and weep. The nearest bandit struck him into silence.

It was very quick. The sky was red, then orange, then a filthy yellow, then bloodied and muddied back into darkness, leaving only the half-glow low on the horizon, which was the burning villages. The sound came late to us, rumbled deeply, and was gone.

I looked at Darak, and his face was hard and shut. But I knew behind his eyes, as behind mine, the thought of the village would not be still.

Their goddess abandoned them, and the wrath of the mountain came in her wake.

I remembered the altar of Evil, so far away reality had almost faded it. I remembered the voice in my skull:
You are cursed, and carry a curse with you; there will be no happiness.

* * *

With a silence on us now, and the reddish lamp still alight behind us, we came up to the trees an hour later.

A rider near Darak made a sound in his throat like the barking of a hill-fox, twice, then again twice, and was answered from the trees. Three or four men untwisted themselves from the shadows, and ran up. I saw the glint of knives, but it was all formality. They must have been able to see us for hours.

A few moments in talk, gesticulations backward toward Makkatt, then we were going on, through the trees, among high jutting rocks. Three more halts and signalings with sentries—elaborate birdcalls and passwords—the gaudy toys of dangerous and well-organized men.

Then the ground seemed to open in front of us. I looked between the rock, and saw, carved through the hills, a long ravine. It was about four miles in length and perhaps a mile across, and overhung by the slopes on every side. Trees leaned over it, pines and staggering larches. Grass grew in the bowl, and pasture land where there would be brown cattle and wild little sheep. On the east side a waterfall smoked down, and there was other smoke also—and the glint of cluster upon cluster of cooking fires, outside and around the lanes of leather tents.

In the black of night, the downward track was hard and treacherous. Men cursed and horses stumbled, and little things ran away skittering, with bright eyes.

* * *

Nearer and nearer the fire blur, the smell of food and huddle and closeness. There seemed no way out now up the steep sides of the ravine.

The track widened out. We were on level ground.

Darak swung down from the horse, his men following his example. Boys came and took their mounts away to horse pens up against the escarpment, but Darak's horse was taken somewhere else. The place jumped in the firelight, unsteady and uncertain.

I sat still on the mule, waiting.

Darak turned abruptly and came back to me.

I looked down at his face but it was all one with the moving, twisting light. I could not be sure what his look or his eyes said to me.

“They'll put up your tent for you over there, near the waterfall. I'll send the girl to take care of your wants—a sort of servant, but she won't say much about it. If you need anything, get word to me. You're free to do as you like here.”

“Oh, yes?” I said softly.

His narrow eyes narrowed further until they were glittering slits.

“Yes.”

There was a silence between us, through the noise starting up all around. Then he said:

“I've work to do, things to get done. You understand.”

He turned, and began to walk away. A tall slight woman with a cloud of black hair came out of the redness ahead of him. Rings gleamed on her hands and on his as they met. He kissed her in full view of me. There seemed no logical reason why he should not.

Then she led him into a tent with blue eye-shapes painted on it.

I slid down from the mule, and the uneasy stares of the bandits flickered, heads turned, as I went by them, into the dark, while behind us all, unseen, the burning in the sky went on and on.

2

So, I might do as I liked.

This glorious freedom the king had granted me was like a weight around my soul's neck. He had brought me here—curious about himself, not me—and now, losing interest, he handed me this strange manumission which meant nothing in physical terms, for I was their prisoner in all senses once I knew their stronghold, but meant at the same moment so much: because, by it, he had disowned me. What then had I expected?

The long sleeps came on me again, after that night of arrival. I lay still, as I had lain in the village temple, my eyes often open, in a kind of trance. I scared the girl who came with food and coals and fresh water. She ran out yelling that I was stiff, hard and icy as a block of stone, and did not breathe. Perhaps this was true, perhaps she imagined it, but none of the women would come in my tent after that. Not that I missed them, nor they me. They were a wild bitch race, on their own among women, as I suppose all breeds of women are. They fought for their men between themselves, but did not then ride to a fight along with these men. They dressed half the time as the men did, but cooked and darned and bore their babies as if they had no other function except to be female and subservient. They had their own mysteries, and something in me shrank from their bright golden stupidity, and the sedentary glamour of their lives.

* * *

The dreams came. The shining rooms, the courts with their elaborate paving and fountains, all empty now. In a vast hall, a statue of black marble, glossy like glass. A man dressed simply, with long hair and short beard. Not here that face which haunted me, which later I had met in Darak. This was another stranger.

Where was this place, the ruin of my home? I must find it. And here I sat in the bandit's tent.

There was in me then silent anger at myself. The piece of jade lay cool on my skin, but my life was in darkness.

So the days passed.

The camp ground was much as I had imagined, pasture dotted with cows, sheep, and goats, an orchard of fruit trees—the leftovers of some old farm, now in ruins, at the southern end of the ravine. There were vines, too, and some vegetable patches. This kind of husbandry was the women's task. The men hunted when they were not out on other errands, and brought back steaming bloody carcasses with drooping heads.

There were a lot of people in the ravine, and it was a hotbed of their jealousies and quarrels. Some of these came to me—requests for love-potions and death-wishes, which were not granted. As for their sick, when they thought I might help them, it seemed I could do it. Otherwise, I was powerless. This made me afraid. I was the outcast in their midst. They would turn on me at last and rend me as a pack of dogs rend the lame dog when it falls. I had my enemies already—the girl whose jade I took, the man I had kicked in the genitals, and many more now, angry I had not cast their spells for them. Darak ignored, or did not see, this situation. There was a war over the hills, beyond the plains and the mountain ring and the wide river, in the southern desert regions, whose ancient great cities still stood like monoliths. It was another world to the bandits, that land, but it provided bounty. A caravan was going south, packed with war gear, bronze and iron and some gold. Darak would take this, and then barter it, piece by piece, among the plains tribes for their own smaller battles. Or perhaps he would ride south himself (he had done it before), and come into the mountain towns, claiming to be a merchant, with goods and armor to sell them.