by C. L. Moore
Far, far away through the crystal on which she stood, a lazy motion stirred. Too far to make out clearly. It moved like smoke, but she did not think it was smoke. In a leisurely, expanding column it moved toward her, whether swiftly or slowly she did not even think, for awareness of time had ceased. And she could not tell if it were rising from fathoms underfoot or coiling down out of the sky toward her as she stood upside down on a crystal ceiling.
Nearer and nearer it came twisting, intangible as smoke and moving with the beautiful, lazy billowing of smoke—but it was not smoke at all.
When it had come almost to her feet it expanded into a great, slow ring and came drifting toward her and around her and up past her through the solid substance on which she stood. And as the ring like a wide, hazy, yawning mouth swept upward a voice that she thought she knew, said quietly in her ears:
“You may speak.”
The shock of that voice, when she had felt no presence near, was nothing compared with the deeper shock of the voice’s familiarity. “I can’t stand it!” Juille told herself in sudden hysteria. “I can’t!” Was there no one at all to be trusted? Did everyone she knew have a second self waiting behind veils of intrigue to speak enigmatically when she least expected it? First Helia—now—Whose was the voice? It might be her father’s. It might be her own. It might not be familiar at all until this terrible enchantment made it seem so.
A second intangible yawning ring swallowed her and passed by.
“You may speak,” it said with infinite patience, in exactly the same inflection as before. And this time she decided wildly that it must indeed be her own voice.
“I … I—” What did she want to say? Was she really standing here upon a ceiling of glass, speaking in the gods’ voices and answering herself with her own? It could not be the gods who spoke. They were not here. No one was here but herself. She knew that. She had an unalterable conviction of aloneness, and it must be herself who spoke with the yawning smoke-mouths and answering herself in the same stifled voice.
“You may speak,” the third mouth said, and drifted on past her into the solid darkness above. (Or was it really below?)
“I … my name is—” She paused. It was ridiculous to stand here telling her own voice who she was. She tried again.
“I came for guidance about the … about what to do next. So many lives depend on me—tell me how to save my people from the H’vani.”
The smoke shifted lazily as if in a little breeze. Then a series of widening rings floated up—or down—around her in quick succession, and as each went by, a voice spoke in her ears. One of them was familiar. It might still be hers. The others she had not heard before, and this multiplicity of voices coming just in time to shatter her theory that she had been talking to herself, was intolerably bewildering. The voices spoke to one another impersonally, as if she were not there.
“She says she came for guidance.”
“She came out of jealousy.”
“She cares very little for her people. It was for herself she came.”
“Is her race worth saving?”
“They must have their chance, remember.” (This was the voice she knew.) “The game is almost played, but not quite finished yet. Give her the guidance she asks, and then—watch.”
“But this is so wearying. We have seen it all before. Is there any good in her at all?”
“Little. Little enough. But let the game play out.”
And with that last ring the dizzying swirl of them past her face came to a pause. Juille’s head was reeling. For a while, nothing happened except that the column which was not smoke swayed gracefully like a hazy snake. Then it widened to another mouth that came gaping up through the floor to swallow her.
“You will have your chance to save the race that bred you,” the voice she knew so well said leisurely. “Think well before you take it, for your instinct will be wrong. Upon you and the next few hours the fate of your race depends. What you are yourself will decide it.”
The lazy cloud floated past and faded into the darkness beyond her.
And then a vertigo came upon Juille, so terrible that every cell in her body seemed struggling against every other cell to right itself—to separate and right itself even at the expense of partition from the rest. Up was down, and down was up. In the dreadful, wrenching confusion, she thought she had one glimpse below her of rolling clouds and rain that came lancing straight upward toward her feet, while she saw despairingly that treetops, head downward, were blowing in a strong breeze above her. For an instant she stood reversed in space, like an image which the retina reverses upon the brain.
And then she was stumbling through darkness again, with the universe right side up.
She was stumbling through a darkness all clouded with swimming colors. Would the gods appear at all? Was the audience over without a glimpse of them? Or would they rise presently through this swimming dark, vast, inscrutable, wearing no human shapes?
Grass was slippery beneath her feet.
Someone seized her by the shoulders and a man’s voice said, “Open your eyes! Open your eyes! You’re all right now.”
“Egide!”
Her eyes flew open. There was no darkness. The temple—She looked around wildly. Egide’s hard grip bruised her shoulders. Automatically she felt for the needle flash that was her only immediate weapon, Nothing. Her relaxing fingers must have let it fall somewhere in that bewildering darkness. She was still too dazed to understand what had happened, but reflexive animal reactions made her whip into motion, squirming away from his grip.
“No you don’t.” Egide’s hands slid down her arms to clench like iron about her wrists. Memory of Helia’s training came back now and she arched all her whipcord strength to pivot him off balance. But he knew that maneuver as well as she, and it resolved after a moment into a blind, furious hand-to-hand struggle. And since he was much stronger than she, with the sheer, solid bulk of muscular weight, in a short while she hung gasping with rage against his chest, both arms twisted agonizingly behind her.
“This,” said Egide with a breathless grin, “is luck!”
“Luck!” Juille’s blind and frantic brain cleared a little at the word. Luck? Perhaps it was. At any rate, now she had found him. What she would do next she had no idea. Somehow she had to gain the upper hand, keep him from Jair, delay the H’vani flight until she had power enough to stop it. And the Ancients had promised her a chance—
She made herself relax. “Well?” she said coolly.
Egide frowned down at her, taken aback. “Not angry?”
No, she could not afford to be angryhe must find some lever to control him, and she must control herself until she had. She must control more than her temper—It was infuriating that this nearness to him made her heart quicken and sent a treacherous weakness sliding through her limbs. Hanging helpless against his shoulder, her wrists fixed immovably in his grasp, Juille looked up at him with forced detachment. She was an amazon. She must remember it. Her heart and mind were trained to a discipline as stringent as her body’s, and they must not falter.
She made herself study his face with critical calm, looking for the flaws of character she had marked there before. Coolly she regarded him. The fine-grained texture of his weathered skin. The sweat upon his forehead from their sharp struggle, and the drops of blowing rain. Rain beading his hair and the fair curls of his short, careful beard, and his curling yellow lashes. The blue eyes narrowed as he returned her scrutiny.
Yes, it was a weak face. Too sensitive a mouth. She knew she would never trust an amazon with that look about the mouth and eyes. Sentiment and self-indulgence showed there plainly. And other qualities that might pass as virtues in a peacetime world. But she remembered the code of the amazon that demanded a sacrifice of virtues as well as vices to serve the common good. Pity, mercy, compassion—she saw them all here and she despised them all as they looked down out of Egide’s face.
But by the simple, unfair advantage of weight and
muscle, he had the upper hand. She must alter that before she could afford to despise him. She made her voice impersonal and asked quietly, “How did you catch me?” And between the question and his answer, she knew suddenly what she must do. One sure weapon remained to her. Somehow she must trick him into freeing her long enough to use that lens the llar had brought. Afterward—well, then she would have him on a leash, with death at the far end of it. The threat would be a whip to make him obey whatever commands she chose to give. After that, there would be time enough to consider these tangled personal feelings that were undermining all her amazonian resolve. First of all, she must get away.
“Catch you?” he was saying. “Don’t you know? You came out of the temple with your eyes shut and walked down the slope. I was sitting by the … the door there, under the trees. I was—thinking.”
Juille glanced around. Trees everywhere. No great walls leaning inward above their swaying tops. She said:
“Where are we? The temple—it’s gone.”
“Yes. I followed you away from the door. Not very far—but it’s gone now.”
They looked up together, searching for those leaning walls. But the gods had withdrawn with a finality that seemed to deny they had ever been. Juille had a sudden, desperate feeling of loneliness and rebuff. The human mind needs so ardently to lean upon its gods. Even upon terrifying gods, cold and impersonal and aloof as these. But the Ancients had heard their pleas, tolerated their uninvited presence, sent them forth with comfortless, enigmatic words, careless whether humanity lived or died. As if they had tired of human doings altogether. The forest seemed very remote about them just now. It, too, would goon unchanging, whether man lived or vanished from the face of Ericon.
Well—Juille squared her shoulders mentally again—she was far better prepared to face such a universe than Egide would ever be. As to what the gods had told him, it wouldn’t matter once she centered him in her lens. What had they told him? Overpowering curiosity suddenly filled her.
“What … what happened in the temple?” she asked him a little diffidently. He looked down at her, his eyes going unfocused as he remembered. She was pleased to notice that his grip on her wrists had slackened perceptibly, too. A little more conversation and perhaps—“Tell me what happened,” she persisted. “Did they speak to you? Egide, was it really upside down?”
He glanced at her briefly. “You must be crazy,” he said.
Juille stiffened. Another count against him. But curiosity was still strong. She tested his loosening grip very subtly and said again:
“Do tell me about it. You saw the light, and the … the smoke rings—”
“I saw a light, yes.” His eyes came into focus again and he scowled at her. “Smoke rings? You’re out of your head. There was a high altar like a wall, with the … the figures … above it. What did they tell you?”
Juille opened her mouth to protest, and then closed it again, trying to remember what it was they had said. They? Had there really been more voices than one? Voices—voices. For a tantalizing instant, she poised on the very verge of remembering whose that familiar tone had been. But when she reached for the memory, it slipped away.
What was it they had told her? They’d said unpleasant things, certainly. Something about a game that was almost played. Some assurance that she would have her chance—what chance? When? And her instinct would be wrong.
“Never mind,” she said. “But I’m not concerned about the H’vani any more. Not now.” And she smiled secretly. After all, it was nearly true. For she thought she understood what her chance would be. Egide’s grip was slack. In a minute or two she would wrench loose, spin away from him into the forest, hide somewhere just long enough to center his figure in her lens as he blundered after in pursuit.
And then—well, she might not need to kill him. The threat might be enough. With luck, she might even find her way back to the city before Jair gave up waiting and tried for open space. Night was hours away still.
He looked down at her strangely. “You’re lying,” he said. “Unless—” He hesitated. “You know the legend, don’t you? Is there any truth in it?”
“That they’ll give you bad advice if they’ve decided against your side? I don’t know.” Juille exchanged a grave, long look with him. “I don’t know. Do you believe it?”
He hesitated a moment longer, and then his eyes crinkled with laughter.
“No, I don’t. Whatever they told you, I know how to win now.”
She gave him a speculative glance. “Then they lied to one of us. Because I know, too.”
Egide threw back his head and laughed. The confident, full-throated sound of it rang through the forest, silencing the tree frogs’ bubbling songs. His grip upon her wrists was the merest touch now. Juille raked the woods for the nearest refuge, set her teeth and wrenched away. And she knew even as she wrenched that she had moved too soon. Sick dismay flooded her as he whipped out a long arm and grazed her shoulder with clutching fingers—grazed—gripped—held.
Her momentum spun them both around and it was touch and go for a moment. Then his big hands locked upon her shoulders and her jerked her toward him so that she smashed breathlessly against the hard armor of his chest and was pinned there in a heavy embrace that had no tenderness in it.
Not then.
They stood together in that close interlocked intimacy which only lovers or struggling enemies ever share.
“They gave you the wrong advice, then,” Egide told her, as if the scuffle had never happened. Only his shortened breath testified that it had. “They mean your side to lose.”
“How can you be sure?” Juille asked him, straining hard away against his arms.
And he sobered as he met her eyes. He could not be sure. Neither of them could ever be sure, until the last battle ran to its bloody close. There was silence between them for a moment. The dripping forest rustled all around, full of the whisper of fine rain upon leaves, the throaty, dovelike throbbing of tree-frog voices, the murmur of the wet, soft breeze. And there was a feeling of sorcery in the air. Perhaps the vanished temple still lifted its great inward-leaning walls above them, filled with the watching eyes of gods and the gods’ humorless, dispassionate patience that waited to see their doomed supplicant take the first step toward his own ruin.
Each of them was suddenly very thankful for human companionship. For an instant they were no longer antagonists, and the struggle in which they were locked resolved itself imperceptibly, with the old treachery their bodies knew, into an embrace neither intended. In the back of their minds, neither of them forgot that they were enemies. Each remembered that only one of the two might leave these woods alive. But for the moment, another memory came back to engulf them both, blotting away the forest and the rain and even the aloof presence of the gods.
They did not speak for a while. They looked at one another with remembering eyes, and Egide’s embrace held no more of its savage coercion, and Juille was not straining against it. Presently, he said in a low voice:
“ining harle—did you know me on Cyrille?”
She shook her head in silence, not sure that she wanted to recognize this mood with speech. Before, it had been a thing of the senses, to let slip when the senses released it, and with no words to pin the remembrance inescapably in their minds.
But Egide went on. “I knew you,” he said. “I meant to kill you. Did you guess that?”
She nodded, her eyes on his face watchfully.
“But no one else ever knew about it,” Egide told her. “Not even Jair. No one knows at all but you and me.”
Juille stared up at him. She knew the truth when she heard it, and she thought this was the truth. If she accepted it, a great many preconceived ideas would begin to turn themselves over in her mind. So many implications lay behind that simple speech—but just now she could not pause to think. Just now Egide was about to kiss her—
It was a long kiss. Their first since Cyrille, and perhaps their last. While it endured, all sound b
lanked out around them and a dissolving intoxication loosened all Juille’s muscles, and even her mind ceased to be wary and afraid.
Then Egide’s unsmiling face was looking down at her from very near, an eagerness and a humility upon it she had never seen there before. And suddenly she knew how treacherous this was. Egide had surrendered without reservation to it. In this moment she knew she could bend him to whatever purpose she chose. Even compromise with the Lyonese. Even peace, if it were peace she wanted.
Abruptly she was frightened. This strong emotion between them was a drug and a drunkenness more dangerous than wine, the most treacherous thing that ever happened to an amazon. Because he might be able to sway her, too—and she desperately feared her own surrender. Like drunkenness, this emotion distorted the focus of reality, dulled reason’s keen edge, reduced the mind to a maudlin softness that denied all values but its own. It was no more to be trusted than drunkenness. It was as false as the illusions of Cyrille. As false, and as irresistibly lovely, and as dangerous as death.
If she ever gave up to it, the moment was not now. Later, when she had him under tangible control—He was weak now, but the weakness might not last. She needed the leash of the Dunnarian weapon, and the whip of the threat it held. She lifted her eyes to Egide’s.
He was holding her like a lover, waiting with an eagerness he made no attempt to conceal. This was the moment the Ancients must have meant. Now, in his weakness—now!
Juille lowered her head and struck him a heavy blow beneath the chin with her helmet. In the same moment, she leaped backward out of his embrace and whirled toward the nearest trees.
Egide dropped—dropped to hands and knees and thrust one leg out to its full, long length. Juille saw just too late what was coming. Futile rage flared up consumingly in the timeless instant while y in thtruggled to avoid him. She could not let Egide frustrate her again—she could not! But momentum was too much for her. She felt her own foot catch against the outthrust leg, and she felt herself plunging face down into the underbrush beneath the trees.
