The Birthgrave (61 page)

I was crouching low against the floor, one arm over my head, my chin pressed down against my breasts.

“No,” he said. Kneeling behind me, he peeled my fingers from my face, and when I replaced them with my other hand, he took that away also. He held my hands to my sides. His face was against mine as I tried to bury it in my breast. “Look up,” he said. “Look up.” There was something in his voice—part laughter, part bitter sadness. I raised my head a little way, though not far enough to see. “Look up,” he said to me. Gently he put his hand under my chin and lifted it, and now I looked into the mirror.

I saw then what the villagers had seen when I came to after the volcano's first anger. I saw what Darak had seen by the lake, and later in the half-darkness, and after that through the nights and dawns of our privacy together. I saw what Uasti had seen, what Vazkor had seen and flinched at, what Kotta had visualized in the tent on Snake's Road. I saw what Rarm saw as he kneeled behind me.

And I saw what it was that made them afraid, or silent, and it was not what I had thought.

It was because I was beautiful. More beautiful than the best of human beauty, more beautiful than a beauty which can be understood, and because it was not a beauty which is of men, though of their planet, the beauty which had been, like Power, the birthright of the Lost.

Slowly, with infinite care, I touched my face, the flawless whiteness, the planes and curves like the map of some undiscovered landscape in a dream. My fingers brushed the mouth, lightly, the forehead, the long, long diamonds of eyes, which are, of all the differences, perhaps the most different from the human. I stared at myself, and felt no hubris at all, because it seemed, will always seem, that this is not my face, I, who was cursed with great ugliness.

“Now you understand,” Rarm said to me. “It was the last cut against yourself to become convinced of your own hideousness. You held to it and nurtured it, and even identified with the devil goddess of Orash in your determination to be accursed. And it never occurred to you that perhaps you saw a false image under the mountain.” With one hand he reached out, and his forefinger lay across my forehead, pointing to that triangle of soft green light above and between my eyes. “And there is your soul-kin, the green Jade. Inserted under the skin, as with all your race, a few hours after birth, when the child sleeps. How hopeless you made your quest, searching your world for what you already carried inside you.” His hand moved away, softly touching my hair. “The third eye of the nameless Princess of the Lost. Who has, after all, a name which she now remembers.”

“Yes,” I said.

Kneeling before the bowl of offering, I had whispered it as all who knelt there whispered their names, before beginning the chant of contrition. I had whispered it so often there, it had become the symbol of the bowl, and the symbol of all I feared in myself. But no longer fear, and no longer separation.

“I know my name,” I said to him. “My name is Karrakaz.”

6

So, in the black void of space, in the silver star, I let go the shackles and became myself. And knowing now, able to see beyond myself, I saw that I must leave the ship, and begin again to live in the world of men as I knew them. Not for me the technical power and splendor of the planets which had bred men like Rarm Zavid. My own civilization had gone far in its advancement before pride and stupidity and the curse of men had finished it. But it had traveled a different road from the road which had produced the hollow star. There could be a meeting, but no union. There was no link to hold the pieces of our alien lives as one.

He would not tell me what he had risked to help me. Neither would Ciorden speak of it, but I think it had been much. The men of his ship were anxious to see me go, and to be away back to their home worlds, where men of their culture would judge Rarm for what he had done, his interference in the ways of our world, his delay and his involvement. I could do nothing. Except let him go in peace, trusting his own integrity and intelligence, his own knowledge of what he went to.

And I did not want to let him go. I did not want to lose him in life as I had lost Darak and Asren and Vazkor in death. Nor did he wish to leave me, this much I knew.

Four days after I had come to the ship, it landed smoothly in a rocky valley high in the hills beyond the sea. A new land, yet the same as the land where I had dragged through my year of life. Summer heat droned in the valley, over the tumble of green-edged boulders. No human habitation showed itself for miles. Three or four wild sheep ran from our coming, and I knew that silence would be there, that silence of fear for the unknown thing.

I stood in the glassy room among the pillars, staring at the valley through a viewing screen in the wall. Ciorden had come, and kissed my hand, reminding me again of the notaries of Ezlann or Za. I had thanked him, and smiled at the awe which stole onto his face as he looked at me. It was foolish for him to be taken aback by what he had helped liberate. We both knew it, but it was there all the same. After Ciorden I knew that Rarm would come. And when he came at last, I realized fully that after this I should not see him anymore. The tie that had held me to Sekish was dissolved. There was no fascinated hatred in my love for this man, the man who had given me myself.

“I must take the ship up very soon,” he said. “I've overstayed my leave here.”

“I understand,” I said.

“And you'll take nothing with you?”

“No, Rarm, only this one dress. Before the winter comes I shall have shelter of some sort, and, as we both know now, I do not need food at all, only what I draw from the air as I breathe. It will be a hard lesson for me to relearn, that lost habit, but it can be done, and the sooner I begin, the better.”

“I wish this didn't have to be the finish of it,” he said quietly. “I don't want to leave you.”

“Nor I you,” I said, “but there is no other way for us.”

“No, there isn't any other way.”

It seemed I had been coming toward him from my past all the years I traveled; and now that we met and touched, the moment was achieved—and ended.

He came to me then, and kissed me, intently, yet without particular passion. There was no point in any passion or desire between us. It was too late for us, more than that, there had never been a time for us, would never be. It was the first and last meeting, and now there was almost nothing else to say or do.

Together we walked to the lock of the ship and the hatchway, which gave onto the valley. It opened for me, slowly, rustily, as if reluctant.

“Ciorden would say his computer didn't want you to go,” Rarm said.

I looked outward, and the world yawned before me like the empty void which had hung about the ship.

I put my hand in his a moment, then I looked away from him, into the valley. The hatchway slid toward the ground. I stepped out. I did not look back. I walked over the rocks and the rough mosses. Small pink flowers stood up like a child's vision of stars embroidered on the grass.

I did not look back at him, nor at the ship.

When I reached the crest of the valley, I heard the thin high moan start up behind me. I did not turn. I imagined the oval silver thing lifting, gleaming, from the burned earth, lifting, lifting, high into the blue summer sky, dwindling, changing to a tiny silver light, vanishing, going away and away.

The sound eased and melted on the air. The silence all around me stirred a little. First a cricket creaking, next a flutter of bird wings as a brown pigeon circled over the rocks. Soon a thousand small twitters, rustlings, scutterings. Fear had gone.

Over the crest the world was green, running down toward trees and the far-off glitter of water. Toward pastures, too, perhaps, and toward people. Toward villages and towns and cities, where people held their own scattered remembrance of the Lost, where there might be stone bowls burning flame, and golden books with faded leaves whose guilt and fearful hope of surviving the Plague had given rise to a legend of a second coming of gods.

A hot breeze burned on my naked face, lifted strands of my hair.

I am alone. No one stands beside me. I have no Dark Prince to ride in my chariot, to walk with me, to hold me to him. I have no one. And yet. I myself, at last, I have myself. And to me, at this time, it seems enough. It seems more, much more, than enough.

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