by Janet Morris
His critical facility knew that the wound in its present state would drain. But he was shivering uncontrollably when he finished.
He retrieved the masticated vabillia from his cave, applied it to the round hole in the wound’s center, cut new memnis bark, and repeated the binding process. He did it more to keep moving, to still his teeth from chattering, to gather his wits, than for hygiene. It was, in the end, a sloppier bandage than the first. He shrugged, and winced.
Whelt, no whelt, he cared not. No more than he cared about those creatures whose weapons he bore upon his person. He would live if he kept moving, this he knew. And he would live. He would seek out Mahrlys on his own, and she would see the artifacts he carried, and listen, and perhaps give him answers for these events and seemings that taxed his mind. The wound was real enough, and the food he ate. And if the whelt that was a wehr had not really spoken to him, then at least it had not clawed out his eyes. Nor had any other in the night.
He threw down the last rind of the whelt’s gift, and looked once full around the clearing, that he might spy Kirelli in hiding. Though he barked in pleasure when he determined that no whelt spied on him, it was a false pleasure, and he heard it so. Disappointed, he rose up and moved from the dappled surface of the pool. Without a backward glance, faster than was prudent, he set off down a slight trail he followed without thought, from long familiarity. The whelt’s disappearance followed after him; its image cawed derisively; he had believed, he had wanted to believe, that he was wehr-chosen. He had taken up arms against them, and now he wanted absolution. A great host of fears dogged his steps, spreading wide and closing like pincers about him in the rain-misted thickets. Somehow, the exertion upstepped his disquiet and he fled a phantom Wehrdom through the greenlit wood, until, lungs pumping, he stumbled once too often.
It was where the trail intersected the Dey-Ceilneeth road that he stumbled. He knelt there a long time, gaining breath, supported on his good arm, his bad one hanging limp.
It was a sound that forewarned him. He raised his head and peered into the abating sun-dazzled drizzle, down the rainbow-arched way that stretched wide and straight deep into the bowels of Dey-Ceilneeth. He could have risen. He could conceivably have staggered an hour or so more through the worsening tangle, or fled back the way he had come.
They approached slowly, with infinite majesty over the steaming turves of the great way: a multitude of ptaiss, milk-white, churning. Or so it seemed at first, until his vision focused. Then he simply sat in the middle of the road with his left hand in his lap and waited.
Toward him came a score of ptaiss, flowing like a single drop of water down the road’s middle. In their center, robed in white, walked a tall figure with long, loose hair black as midnight.
His head lowered, he awaited the priestess of Mnemaat.
Waiting, he became aware that he could not have run farther. He began to doubt whether or not he could run at all. By the time he could pick out the ptaiss coughs, pad-clicks, low growls from the sounds around him, he was concentrating on maintaining a sitting position. His body was free from pain, but numb.
He heard: “Rise up.”
He did that, without distress. Without any feeling. He stood as if on another’s feet. He focused his eyes on her face, which loomed close, much closer than the ground, much more comforting. Her eyes were green, and all colors danced therein. They widened when she spoke:
“Feeling better, my fallen iyl? I would venture to hope so.”
His, peripheral vision was aware of the ptaiss parting, of her stepping down the aisle they made, ever closer, but his direct sight was only of her eyes, whose size did not vary even as she approached.
Somehow, his consternation never reached his nervous system. He viewed it from a distance, coldly; as he noted the whelt which somehow swooped into his sight, its green eyes becoming one with the woman’s face, until it was a great whelt’s visage that stared at him, looming ever closer upon a woman’s body robed in white. He recorded this occult event without bias, sparing it no emotion.
“Come, then, we will help you. When justice is desired by all, it is quickly done.” And he took her arm and she assisted him, softly but with infinite strength. He saw that the ptaiss closed around them. Their backs swayed rhythmically on all sides. He felt no surprise, not in that or in the fact that he was able to keep the pace the priestess set: when he faltered she would lay her hands upon him and his legs would lighten, his left arm would issue only muted screams, his mind would float above, alert, impassive. And he would walk on.
She fed him and watered him and allowed him to look upon her without her robe. She tended his wound, and the line of her long throat, swooping, gilded his sleep. The ptaiss hunted and she fed him from their kill, tiny strips of raw meat daintily carved. She boiled herbs in an empty gourd over a rock that seemed to heat at her low command. She touched his forehead in the night and laid soothing cloths upon it. In the morning the ptaiss would form once more around them and she would touch him lightly and they would go on. And she would smile sometimes; but not until the third day did she again speak.
“Deilcrit,” she murmured, “whatever possessed you not to die?”
“Ipheri?” he managed, for he did not know her name, and that honorific would do for the its herself.
“Try not to be afraid. In Dey-Ceilneeth, I will not be with you. If you waste your energy in fear, you will heal slowly, and all will be held up just that much more.”
Just then the whelt alighted between them, and her face paled, and her eyes widened until they consumed the sky.
But the whelt beat its wings and screeched its war cry, and seemed almost to dive at her. There was a blur of arms and wings, and the whelt shot into the treetops.
The priestess’s white robe was torn at the seam where sleeve met shoulder. The shoulder, striped with a thin red line, held his eyes. He felt, as before with his fear, only a distant, intellectual realization that something was amiss.
“So, you are other than you appear. Let me apologize,” she whispered.
His arm suddenly began to broadcast its protests, his feet were their own bed of hot coals, his stomach turned to eating itself.
She traced the scratch with her forefinger. The nail was long, shapely.
“Deilcrit, ignorance is your only salvation. Be ignorant. If you are any part of this incursion, even my pity will be insufficient to the plight that must befall you in recompense. Be, by all means, a foolish adolescent, made iyl too soon by circumstance ....” She seemed to want to say more.
He peered attentively at her, waiting.
“Call that whelt,” she commanded, and before he realized it, he had done so.
It screeched from its perch, but, did not move. “It will not come.”
“Because of me. Yet it seems to have answered you. How can you, a guerm-tender, command such a creature?”
He realized then, what she was saying, and bent his head. For a long time he was alone with his pain.
When she chose, she lifted it once more from him.
In the exquisite cessation of discomfort, she asked him for the alien swords he wore about his waist. He would have given her anything, his heart, his life, whatever she asked. He plucked ineffectually at the hastily tied thong, and she slid toward him, and with her own tiny dagger slit the cord. He did not then think to wonder why she did not just take them. Instead, he wondered at the fragrance of her hair. He looked upon the part in her hair, lost in the sheen of the thick smooth strands.
But when the weight was gone from about his waist, when she stepped back from him with a tiny smile of triumph lighting her lips, he was distantly aware that something was very wrong, that more had transpired here than he understood, or would have agreed to had he been ... otherwise. Then he came to it, what he had known but could not feel: that he was in some odd way entrapped; that he must remember this above all things. He wished to feel determination, felt instead confused.
Having acquired the swords, she
retreated to the side of one of the larger ptaiss, curling up against the prostrate beast’s belly. Her robe fell in folds around her, riding the line of her turned hip.
He thought fiercely that she had not totally bested him, that he had retained the knife, also of the strange metal. But a part of him dryly bespoke the truth: she did not want the knife. He knew he was going to go to her, but had no idea what he was going to do. He never did recall it. She did not wish him to recall it. Nor, which is more to the point, did she wish him to forget it: he recalled rising, his, detatched concern for his arm as he knelt before her—then nothing but a sense of shame, an uneasy wondering, and an indebtedness that crouched in his very soul.
He dared not ask her what it was that he had done, nor even make an excuse. Her eyes, when later she looked at him, were those of one who has paid a costly price and been cheated, one whose trust has been betrayed.
She wore the scabbard he had made from Estri’s tunic around her supple waist. His eyes were often upon it in the long days of forced march to which she put them.
It was as if the privilege of hearing her voice would be ever denied him, though he might accompany her and look upon her as he wished, provided he himself did not speak. And this he did, because it occurred to him, because it was a way of retaining his selfdom, because he knew that he was prejudged: “fallen iyl,” she had called him. Whatever he did now could bring upon him no more execrable fate than that which already awaited: he enjoyed the blessing of the condemned: freedom from care.
It was the day upon which she removed his stitches, by his reckoning sixteen days from that rainy midday she had found him in the road, that they entered the maze around Dey-Ceilneeth.
Now, Dey-Ceilneeth is the seat of Law in Benegua; the Temple of Mnemaat, home of His Eye and Mouth; and, by these necessities, the abode of women only: no man enters Dey-Ceilneeth unaccompanied and emerges. From these labyrinthine paths, tortuous beyond mortal comprehension, grown up from Benegua’s most poisonous hedges so long ago that the maze reaches skyward, tall as any deep-forest giants, there is no escape but for the initiate.
He caught himself holding tight to her robe, that he not find himself suddenly alone and helpless among the flesh-eating telsodas that framed the maze’s outer corridors. As tightly fitted as a wall of stone, trimmed perpendicular to the ground for twice his height, the pink-petaled mouths on their thorny stems smacked a thousand lips together as they passed. The sound sighed around them in the dappled light, filtered down toward them from the canopy that grew untrimmed above their heads.
Dangling blossoms writhed from that vaulted ceiling of branches, sometimes idly, sometimes striking with such a force that branches rattled about them, but they always fell short.
Even knowing this, even beside the priestess, in the midst of the tightly packed ptaiss, he ducked reflexively each time the hungry telsodas sought him.
Once he caught her face from the corner of his eye, freed, as he had never before managed to see it, from the veil her eyes threw out. She was most certainly laughing at him. This caused him to stiffen, and when they passed through one of a myriad identical breaks in the telsoda hedge to be confronted by two green-patterned serpents of nightmare proportions, he steeled himself to stride unconcerned between those rewound coils, the thinnest of which was the width of his waist, that slithered restless upon his right and his left.
Putting one foot mechanically before the other, eyes on the ground, he strode right into her, for she had stopped.
Dry-mouthed, trembling with each gust of wind that rattled the fahrass berries of the second hedge, he stared openmouthed as the ptaiss split asunder and she walked down the aisle they made directly toward the right-hand serpent’s coils.
The musky smell of them was intolerable to his instinct-frayed nerves. He found himself pressed closely between two restless ptaiss, leaning upon them for support.
She stood wraithlike before the viper, whose wedge-shaped head swayed and descended until it was at a level with her own. Its twin, across the path, hissed and flickered its black tongue.
She laid her hand on the sinuous neck, and laughed, a low, throaty sound. Then the berceide of the second hedge, for such is the name of the great green snakes that guard Benegua’s sanctum, began a long series of cadenced hisses and odd sibilances which the priestess answered in kind. When their cheeks touched (if such a viper, with head long as a man’s torso, can be said to have a cheek), he cried out, so clearly did his mind’s eye see those coils unreel, whip around the gauze-robed figure, so slight and full of life, and squeeze that life out onto the grass.
But nothing untoward occurred, unless it was that the priestess spoke at length to the berceide in its own sibilant tongue, turned her back, and rejoined him in the midst of the ptaiss.
“All is in readiness for you,” she said to him, and the satisfaction that rode her voice was dire with its foreshadowings. He tried to retreat from her, but the ptaiss against which he had been leaning stood firm. No longer did he feel the detachment which had thus far cushioned his response to all things as they occurred.
“That is right,” she said sweetly. “I have no longer the need to render you tractable by artificial means: you cannot now do otherwise than follow me. You cannot find your way back to the forest, not from within the second hedge.”
The berceides, both with heads resting on their coils, regarded the ptaiss and what stood within patiently, ophidian eyes unblinking.
“No, I cannot. I could not have, in any case,” some part of him said. “And since you have won, since I am your prisoner, why do you still hide your face? What difference if the captive sees the face of his captor?”
“You have been seeing my face, in your dreams if nowhere else, a long time, impertinent one. Dare your posture that you know me not?”
She stripped off the ensorcelment that had thus far masked all but her eyes in a soft haze of light, and he went to his knees among the ptaiss before her.
“Ipheri, forgive me. I—”
“Forgive you? Hardly. But you bear no additional stigma for what has passed between us; all of this”—and she waved her hand, as if to, encompass not only the space around them, but the time he had spent in her presence—“is of my design.”
It was then that the whelt, Kirelli, swooped from nowhere, screeching, toward Mahrlys’ head. A ptaiss leaped, jaws snapping, claw rending the air. But the whelt was gone into the thick-leaved fahrass above their heads.
“For that,” she hissed, “you will suffer. For the loss of Kirelli, I will have full recompense. Now, move!”
He scrambled to his feet, full of remonstrations unspoken: he had not sought the whelt, nor lost her anything by his will. Or he thought he had not. Once he started to speak, but she silenced him angrily and he followed, meek, silent, through the seven concentric mazes that remained between them and the inner chasm.
Before this, in spite of himself, he halted. It was a sight he had never expected to see, nor did he covet its rarity. A great distance below, white water churned and spat and, growled. Across the gorge lay Dey-Ceilneeth herself, scintillant and megalithic, like some gemstone wrapped in foliage. But he was not awed that he stood before the hallowed retreat, not while he faced the chasm and the swaying, lacy bridge that spanned it.
The ptaiss, with uncanny precision, parted, and, taking his hand, she drew him onto the pale lattice that spanned the precipitous drop. He stood with one foot upon the woven bridge, one upon the solid sod. At her urging he shook his head.
“I can force you,” she reminded him, and at his back he heard a growl, and felt a subtle push. There was a stanchion every dozen steps, through which stout rope was threaded. He closed his right fist over these and focused his gaze upon Mahrlys’ white-robed figure before him. It retreated. He followed, not daring to look down, where the white water could be seen between the knotted netting of pale rope. He concentrated on trying to determine of what the ropes were woven, and on Mahrlys-iis-Vahais, moving surefooted
ly before him. Somewhere about the middle of the expanse, when a cruel gust shook the bridge swaying, he used his left hand. He did not realize it until he took a step onto solid ground, until he with an effort of will pried his fingers from the guide ropes. Then he grinned, and flexed each finger in turn, and performed a number of testings upon the limb. Except for a not-unexpected stiffness, and an aching reminder of what work still proceeded within the bandage, of memnis, the arm worked perfectly. A great weight lifted from him. He turned and stared ruminatively at the ptaiss, across the chasm. They were restless, full of coughs and growls; in short: ptaisslike. As he watched, the group dispersed, some heading back into jicekak of the innermost maze, some leaping the crevice with little concern, some wandering along its length.
“Deilcrit,” called the priestess, and it was then that he was struck by her beauty. Earlier, when she stripped off her veil of light, it had been her revealed identity that had dropped him to his knees. Before that, it had been her numinous presence and those very veils that had kept him awed, cowed, unthinking—that and her desire. But he recalled her without her robes. He almost recollected what had passed between them that night. He had had proscribed knowledge of this woman standing before him, of that he was sure. And be she Mahrlys-iis-Vahais or no, she had known him—had tended his wounds, had fed him.
He did not understand the promise made him by Kirelli the wehr; he did not understand her fury concerning the bird’s actions; nor why the wehrs had not killed him when he had raised arms against their kind; or even what significance was to be put upon the swords she now bore slung about her robe and those who had once worn them.
But he did know that she had wanted him, and the swords. That she had wanted him alive and that she had felt the need to obtain his permission before taking the artifacts from him—this he knew. And it was not lost on him that whatever else might be said about Kirelli the whelt, he was an emissary of Wehrdom, and no small force to have upon one’s side; Mahrlys was incensed at having “lost” him. He wondered what she would think if she knew what the power that called itself Chayin had promised him. Perhaps he would try speaking that one’s name, as he had been counseled, should his need grow great. And then he remembered the whelt, spying upon him from the trees, and wagered within himself as to whether Mahrlys did in truth already know. Since the wager turned out not in his favor, he determined to keep his own counsel, and to hold these truths, his only possible weapons, sacrosanct against any interrogation. He did not realize how difficult this would come to be.
