Whether he could actually kill a robber with it was another matter. Surely he wouldn't have to. They were on the Oversoul's errand here in the desert, weren't they? The Oversoul would steer the robbers away from them. Just as the Oversoul would lead them to water and food, when they ran out of their traveling supplies.
Then Nafai remembered that this whole business began because the Oversoul wasn't as competent as it used to be. How did he know the Oversoul could do any of those things? Or that it even had a plan? Yes, it had sent Luet to warn them, and had wakened Nafai to go hear the warning, and had sent Father his own dream. But that didn't mean that the Oversoul actually had any intention of protecting them or even of leading them anywhere except away from the city. Who knew what the Oversoul's plans were? Maybe all it needed was to get rid of Wetchik and his family.
With that grim thought, Nafai sat high above the desert, his leg hooked around the pommel of his saddle, as he searched in all directions for robbers, for pursuers from the city, for any strange thing on the road, for signs from the Oversoul. The only music was Mebbekew's complaints and Elemak's orders and the occasional splat-ting as the camels voided their bowels. Nafai's beast, oblivious to any worries except where to put its feet, continued its rolling gait onward into the heat of day.
NINE - LIES AND DISGUISES
With the moon up, it was much easier for Luet to find her way back into the city than it had been for her to get to Wetchik's house. Besides, now she knew her destination; it's always easier to return home than to find a strange place.
Oddly, though, she didn't feel a sense of danger until she got back into the city itself. The guard at the Funnel Gate was away from his post-perhaps he had been caught sleeping, or perhaps the Oversold made him think of some sudden errand. Luet had to smile to herself at the thought of the Oversoul troubling herself to make a man feel an urgent need to void his bladder, just for Luet's safe passage.
Within the city, though, the moon was less help. In fact, since it hadn't yet risen very high, it cast deep shadows, and the north-south streets were still in utter blackness at street level. Anyone might be abroad at this hour. Tolchocks were known to be abroad much earlier in the night, when there were still many women abroad in the streets. Now, though, in the loneliest hours before dawn, there might be much worse than tolchocks about.
"Isn't she the pretty one?"
The voice startled her. It was a woman, though, a husky-voiced woman. It took a moment for Luet to find her in the shadows. "I'm not pretty," she said. "In the darkness your eyes deceived you."
It had to be a holy woman, to be on the street at this hour. As she stepped from the dark corner where she had taken shelter from the night breeze, the woman's dirty skin showed a bit paler than the surrounding shadow. She was naked from face to foot. Seeing her, Luet felt the cold of the autumn night. As long as Luet had been moving, she had kept warm from the exercise. Now, though, she wondered how this woman could live like this, with no barrier between her skin and the chilling air except for the dirt on her body.
Mother was a wilder, thought Luet. I was born to such a one as this. She slept in the desert when I was in her womb, and carried me, as naked as she was, into the city to leave me with Aunt Rasa. Not this one, though. My mother, wherever she is, is not a holy woman anymore. Only a year after I was born she left the Oversoul to follow a man, a farmer, to a hardscrabble life in the rocky soil of the Chalvasankhra Valley. Or so Aunt Rasa said.
"Beautiful are the eyes of the holy child," intoned the woman, "who sees in the darkness and burns with bright fire in the frozen night."
Luet permitted the woman to touch her face, but when the cold hands started to pull at her clothing, Luet covered them with her own. "Please," she said. "I am not holy, and the Oversoul doesn't shield me from the cold."
"Or from the prying eyes," said the holy woman. "The Oversoul sees you deep, and you are holy, yes you are."
Whose were the prying eyes? The Oversoul's? The eyes of men who sized up women as if they were horses? Gossips' eyes? Or this woman's? And as for being holy-Luet knew better. The Oversoul had chosen her, yes, but not for any virtue in herself. If anything, it was a punishment, always to be surrounded by people who saw her as an oracle instead of a girl. Hushidh, her own sister, had once said to her, "I wish I had your gift; everything is so clear to you." Nothing is clear to me, Luet wanted to say. The Oversoul doesn't confide in me, she merely uses me to transmit messages that I don't understand myself. Just as I don't understand what this holy woman wants with me, or why-if the Oversoul sent her-she was sent to me.
"Don't be afraid to take him beside the water," said the holy woman.
"Who?" asked Luet.
"The Oversoul wants you to save him alive, no matter what the danger. There is no sacrilege in obeying the Oversoul."
"Who?" asked Luet again. This confusion, this dread that she must decode the puzzle of these words or suffer some terrible loss-was this how others felt when she told them of her visions?
"You think all the visions should come to you ," said the holy woman. "But some things are too clear for you to see yourself. Eh?"
I think nothing of the kind, holy woman. I never asked for visions, and I often wish they had come to other people. But if you're going to insist on giving me some message, then have the decency to make it as intelligible as you can. It's what I try to do,
Luet tried to keep her resentment out of her voice, but she could not resist insisting on a clarifying answer. "Who is this him that you keep talking about?"
The woman slapped her sharply across the face. It brought tears to Luet's eyes-tears as much of shame as of pain. "What have I done?"
"I have punished you now for the defiling you will do," said the holy woman. "It's done, and no one can demand that you pay more."
Luet didn't dare ask questions again; the answer was not to her liking. Instead she studied at the woman, trying to see if there was understanding in her eyes. Was this madness after all? Did it have to be the true voice of the Oversoul? So much easier if it was madness.
The old woman reached her hand toward Luet's cheek again. Luet recoiled a little, but the woman's touch was gentle this time, and she brushed a tear from the hollow just under Luet's eye. "Don't be afraid of the blood on his hands. Like the water of vision, the Oversoul will receive it as a prayer."
Then the holy woman's face went slack and weary, and the light went out of her eyes. "It's cold," she said.
"Yes."
"I'm too old," she said.
Her hair wasn't even gray, but yes, thought Luet, you are very, very old.
"Nothing will hold," said the holy woman. "Silver and gold. Stolen or sold."
She was a rhymer. Luet knew that many people thought that when a holy woman went a-rhyming, it meant that the Oversoul was speaking through her. But it wasn't so-the rhyming was a sort of music, the voice of the trance that kept some of the holy women detached from their bleak and terrible life. It was when they stopped rhyming that there was a chance they might speak sense.
The holy woman wandered away, as if she had forgotten Luet was there. Since she seemed to have forgotten where her sheltered corner was, Luet took her by the hand and led her back there, encouraged her to sit down and curl up against the wall that blocked the wind. "Out of the wind," whispered the holy woman. "How they have sinned."
Luet left her there and went on into the night. The moon was higher now, but the better light did little to cheer her. Though the holy woman was harmless in herself, she had reminded Luet of how many people there might be, hiding in the shadows. And how vulnerable she was. There were stories of men who treated citizens the way that the law allowed them to deal with the holy women. But even that was not the worst fear.
There is murder in the city, thought Luet. Murder in this place, not holiness, and it is Gaballufix who first thought of it. If not for the vision and warning I carried for the Oversold, good men would have died. She shuddered again at the memory of the sl
it throat in her vision.
At last she came to the place where the Holy Road widened out as it descended into the valley, becoming, not a road, but a canyon, with ancient stairs carved into the rock, leading directly down to the place where the lake steamed hot with a tinge of sulphur. Those who worshiped there always kept that smell about them for days. It might be holy, but Luet found it exceedingly unpleasant and never worshiped there herself. She preferred the place where the hot and cold waters mixed and the deepest fog arose, where currents swirled their varying temperatures all around her as she floated ori the water. It was there that her body danced on the water with no volition of her own, where she could surrender herself utterly to the Oversold.
Who was the holy woman speaking about? The "him" with blood on his hands, the "he" that she could take by the waters-presumably the waters of the lake.
No, it was nothing. The holy woman was one of the mad ones, making no sense.
The only man she could think of who had blood on his hands was Gaballufix. How could the Oversoul want such a man as that to come near the holy lake? Would the time come when she would have to save Gaballufix's life? How could such a thing possibly fit in with the purposes of the Oversoul?
She turned left onto Tower Street, then turned right onto Rain Street, which curved around until she stood before Rasa's house. Home, unharmed. Of course. The Oversoul had protected her. The message she had delivered was not the whole purpose the Oversoul had for her; Luet would live to do other work. It was a great relief to her. For hadn't her own mother told Aunt Rasa, on the day she put Luet as an infant into Rasa's arms, "This one will live only as long as she serves the Mother of Mothers?" The Mother of Mothers had preserved her for another night.
Luet had expected to get back into Aunt Rasa's house without waking anyone, but she hadn't taken into account how the new climate of fear in the city had changed even the household of the leading housemistress of Basilica. The front door was locked on the inside. Still hoping to enter unobserved, she looked for a window she might climb through. Only now did she realize that all the windows facing the street were solely for the passage of light and air-many vertical slits in the wall, carved or sculpted with delicate designs, but with no gap wide enough to let even the head and shoulders of a child pass through.
This is not the first time there has been fear in Basilica, she thought. This house is designed to keep someone from entering surreptitiously in the night. Protection from burglars, of course; but perhaps such windows were designed primarily to keep rejected suitors and lapsed mates from forcing their way back into a house that they had come to think of as their own.
The provisions that kept a man from entering also barred Luet, slight as she was. She knew, of course, that there was no way to get around the sides of the house, since the neighboring structures leaned against the massive stone walls of Rasa's house.
Why didn't she guess that getting back inside would be so much harder than getting out? She had left after dark, of course, but well before the house quieted down for the evening; Hushidh knew something of her errand and would keep anyone from discovering her absence. It simply hadn't occurred to either of them to arrange how Luet would get back in. Aunt Rasa had never locked the front door before. And later, after the Oversold had made the guard doze on the way out and had kept him away from the gate entirely on her return, Luet had assumed that the Oversoul was smoothing the way for her.
Luet thought of staying out on the porch all night. But it was cold now. As long as she had been walking, it was all right, she had stayed warm enough. Sleep, though, would be dangerous. City women, at least those of good breeding, did not own the right clothing for sleeping out of doors. What the holy women did would make her ill.
There might be another way, however. Wasn't Aunt Rasa's portico on the valley-side of the house completely open? There might be a way to climb up from the valley. Of course, the area just east of Rasa's portico was the wildest, emptiest part of the Shelf-it wasn't even part of a district, and though Sour Street ran out into it, there was no road there; women never went that way to get to the lake.
Yet she knew that this was the way she must go, if she was to return to Aunt Rasa's house.
The Oversoul again, leading her. Leading her, but telling her nothing.
Why not? asked Luet for the thousandth time. Why can't you tell me your purpose? If you had told me I was going to Wetchik's house, I wouldn't have been so fearful all the way. How did my fear and ignorance serve your purpose? And now you send me around to the wild country east of Aunt Rasa's house-for what purpose? Do you take pleasure in toying with me? Or am I too stupid to understand your purpose? I'm your homing dove, able to carry your messages but never worth explaining them to.
And yet, despite her resentment, a few minutes she stepped from the last cobbles of Sour Street onto the grass and then plunged into the pathless woods of the Shelf.
The ground was rugged, and all the gaps and breaks in the underbrush seemed to lead downward, away from Rasa's portico and toward the cliffs looming over the canyon of the Holy Road. No wonder that even the Shelf women built no houses here. But Luet refused to be led astray by the easy paths-she knew they would disappear the moment she started following them. Instead she forced her way through the underbrush. The zarosel thorns snagged at her, and she knew they would leave tiny welts that would sting for days even under a layer of Aunt Rasa's balm. Worse, she was bone-weary, cold, and sleepy, so that at times she caught herself waking up, even though she had not been asleep. Still-she had set herself on this course, and she would finish.
She came into a small clearing where bright moonlight filtered through the canopy of leaves overhead. In a month all the leaves would be gone and these thickets would not be half so forbidding. Now, though, a patch of light came like a miracle, and she blinked.
In that eyeblink, the clearing changed. There was a woman standing there.
"Aunt Rasa," whispered Luet. How did she know to come looking for me here? Has the Oversold spoken again to someone else?
But it was not Aunt Rasa, after all. It was Hushidh. How could she have made such a mistake?
No. Not a mistake. For now Hushidh had changed again. It was Eiadh now, that beautiful girl from Hushidh's class, the one that poor Nafai was so uselessly in love with. And again the woman was transformed, into the actress Dol, who had been so very famous as a young girl; she was one of Aunt Rasa's nieces, and in recent years had returned to the house to teach. Once it was said that Dolltown was named after her (though it had been named such for ten thousand years at least), she was so beautiful and broke so many hearts; but she was in her twenties now, and the features that, when she was a girl, made women want to mother her and ravished the eyes of men were not so astonishing in a woman. Still, Luet would give half her life if during the other half she could be as delicately, sweetly beautiful as Dol.
Why is the Oversoul showing me these women?
From Dol the apparition changed to Shedemei, another of Aunt Rasa's nieces. If anything, though, Shedya was the opposite of Dol and Eiadh. At twenty-six she was still in Aunt Rasa's house, helping to teach science to the older students as her own reputation as a geneticist grew. Most nights she actually slept in her laboratory, many streets away, instead of her room in Rasa's house, but still she was a strong, quiet presence there. Shedemei was unbeautiful; not so ugly as to startle the onlooker, but deeply plain, so that the longer one studied her face the less attractive it became. Yet her mind was like a magnet, drawn to truth: as soon as it came near enough, she would leap to it and cling. Of all Aunt Rasa's nieces, she was the one that Luet most admired; but Luet knew that no more had she the wit to emulate Shedemei than she had the beauty to follow Dol's career. The Oversoul had chosen to send her visions to one who had no other use to the world.
The woman was gone. Luet was alone in the clearing, and she felt again as if she had just awakened.
Was this only a dream, the kind that comes when you don't even
know that you're asleep?
Behind where the apparitions had stood, she saw a single light burning in the dark of earliest morning. It had to be on Aunt Rasa's portico-in that direction there could be no other source of light. Maybe the vision had been right thus far. Aunt Rasa was awake, and waiting for her.
She pushed forward into the brush. Low twigs swiped at her, thorns snagged at her clothing and her skin, and the irregular ground deceived her, causing her to trip and stumble. Always, though, that light was her beacon, drawing her on until at last it went out of sight as she drew under the lip of Rasa's portico.
It rose in a single sheet of weathered stone, sheer from base to balustrade, with no handholds. And it was at least four meters from the ground to the top. Even if Aunt Rasa was there waiting for her, there'd be no way to climb up, not without calling for servants. And if she was going to have to disturb the house anyway, she might as well have pulled the bellcord at the front door!
. It happened that after having been forced this way and that by the rough ground of the forest, Luet had finally approached Rasa's house almost from the south. Most of the face of the portico was hidden from her. It was possible that the house had been built with some access from the portico to the wood. Surely the builders had planned for more than a mere view of the Rift Valley. And even if there was no deliberate access, there had to be a spot where she would have some hope of climbing up.
Making her way around the curved stone surface, Luet at last found what she had hoped for-a place where the broken ground rose higher in relation to the portico. Now the top of the balustrade was only an arm's length out of her reach. And, as she reached up to try to find a handhold in the gaps of the balustrade, she saw Aunt Rasa's face, as welcome as sunrise, and her arms reaching down for her.
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