The Complete Lythande

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  The geas she was under was literal; she might reveal herself to no man. I am not sure this harpy is a woman, Lythande thought, but I am certain she is no man.

  “Do you mock at me, minstrel?” the woman demanded. “Do you think yourself too good for my favors?” Once again it seemed that fire streamed from her hair, from the spread wings of her sleeves. And at that moment Lythande knew what she saw.

  “Alnath,” she whispered, and held out her hand. Yet this was nothing so simple as a fire-elemental; this was a were-dragon in full strength, and she remembered the fate of Ellifanwy.

  “Lady,” she said, “you do me too much honor, for I am not Tashgan, nor even a man. I am but a humble minstrel woman.”

  She bowed her head before the flames suddenly surrounding her. Were-dragons were always of uncertain temper; but this one chose to be amused; flames licked around Lythande with the gusting laughter, but Lythande knew that if she showed the slightest fear, she was doomed.

  Calling up the memory of the fire-elemental, Lythande made a clear picture in her mind of Alnath perched on her wrist, flames sweeping gracefully upward. She felt again the sense of kinship she had experienced with the little fire-elemental, and it enabled her to look up and smile at the were-dragon confronting her.

  The gusts of laughter subsided to a chuckle, and once again it was woman not dragon confronting Lythande: the little hearth-witch. “And did Tashgan know your sex—or did he expect you to take over his round in all things?”

  Lythande said ruefully “The latter, judging by the instructions he gave me,” and the lady was laughing again.

  “You must have had a most interesting journey here, my dear!”

  Lythande’s mind suddenly started working furiously, recalling quite clearly the instructions Tashgan had given her. He had definitely been amused about something: yet Lythande was sure he had not known her secret. No, what amused him had been... “Beauty!” The lady was regarding her attentively. “By any chance, Lady, was he given to calling you—Beauty?”

  “The dear boy! He remembered!” The lady was positively simpering.

  He certainly did, Lythande thought grimly. And boyish is a mild description of his sense of humor! Perhaps he thought me as vulnerable to playing with fire as Ellifanwy? It would have amused Tashgan to send her to share Ellifanwy’s fate. Aloud she said, “He asked me to give you his love.” Her hostess looked pleased, but Lythande decided that a bit more flattery would probably help. “Of all the sacrifices he made for his throne, you were the one he regretted most. His duty called him to Tschardain.” She hesitated slightly, remembering the look in the dragon-woman’s eyes at the sight of the lute. “If you would not object, I think this affair would make a splendid romantic ballad.” By now the were-dragon was virtually purring.

  “Nothing would delight me more, my dear, than to serve as inspiration to art.”

  “And,” Lythande continued, “I would be honored—and I know it would give Tashgan the greatest pleasure—if you would accept this lute as a small token of the devotion we feel toward you.”

  Flame flared almost to the ceiling; but the were-dragon’s face was wreathed in joyous smiles as she gently took up the lute and caressed the strings.

  ~o0o~

  Early the next morning, Lythande took cordial leave of her hostess. As she picked a careful way through the bog she could hear the strumming of the lute behind her. The were-dragon had more musical ability than Prince Tashgan, that was certain, but the ballad that formed in Lythande’s mind was not of love bravely sacrificed to duty, but of a wandering were-dragon minstrel and an unexpected guest at the Yule-feast in Tschardain. Making a mental note to spend Yule in Northwander—if not even farther north—Lythande left the bog behind her and went laughing up the northward road.

  Bitch

  Darkness was falling in Old Gandrin, in an unfamiliar quarter of the city. Lythande, the Pilgrim Adept of the Blue Star, was alone, isolated and abandoned, far from her usual haunts—insofar as she had usual haunts, or could count on anything to recur and be ordinary in her far from ordinary life. To add to the general dismalness of the night, a light rain was falling, not heavily but with drizzling persistence, not enough to soak anything, but enough to banish dryness, warmth or comfort and imbue everything with a miserable and pervasive dampness throughout.

  Although the streets of Old Gandrin were perhaps safer for an Adept of the Blue Star than for an average citizen, they could hardly be said to be altogether safe for anyone after dark, and Lythande had no desire to be attacked or robbed in the deserted fields of the graveyard district. She had come there considerably earlier in the day, in search of certain herbs and ingredients for the making of spells; it was said to add to the efficacy of such ingredients that they grew or had been gathered in the shadow of the gallows.

  Lythande was not altogether certain that she believed this, but if her clients believed it, she could hardly afford the luxury of flouting this belief; after all, belief was a major ingredient which must be liberally stirred into every spell before it could work at all.

  Around her stretched a series of barren open fields which had perhaps been last cultivated before the city walls were built; here and there she could see the dim lights of occasional scattered dwellings. Even if the night had been clear there would have been little moon; it was her business to know such things. The aforesaid gallows cast a long and wavering shadow almost to Lythande’s very feet, but there was no sign anywhere of light such as might have marked out an inn or any such place where one might find lodging. Beyond the gallows a broken field stretched, lumpy and barren with the uneven shapes of old and fallen gravestones. A deserted place, good perhaps for ghosts but less salubrious for mortals; and Lythande, in spite of a life prolonged by magic to the span of three ordinary lifetimes, still counted herself among the living and mortal.

  At this moment a shadow crossed her path and a not unfamiliar voice spoke. “Who goes there? Speak!”

  “I am a minstrel and magician by the name of Lythande,” she said, and in answer came the most unexpected of words;

  “Greetings, fellow Pilgrim; what do you on this lonely road at this god-forgotten hour?”

  “If indeed there are gods, a question about which I entertain certain doubts,” Lythande observed calmly, “I would think it unlucky to call any place god-forgotten in the fear that they might in fact forget it.”

  “Even if there be no gods,” replied the newcomer, a dark shadow on the path, “I should consider it unlucky to say so, for fear that if they do in fact exist and I show bad manners by refusing to believe in them, they might retaliate by refusing to believe in me.

  Lythande found the sound of that paradox sufficiently familiar to say “Do I speak then to a fellow Pilgrim?”

  “You do,” replied the voice, “I am your fellow minstrel Rajene; we have debated these questions before this time in the courts of the Blue Star to the sound of the lute. Do I guess rightly that we should together seek shelter, if only against damp and ghosts, for the exchange of songs?”

  “I am unfamiliar with these quarters,” Lythande said. “And while I have not yet encountered a ghost here or elsewhere, I observe somewhat similar precautions about ghosts as you against gods touching their existence or nonexistence, in case I should have good reason for abandoning my disbelief.”

  Now in the darkness Lythande could make out the lines of a voluminous mage-robe cut like her own, deeply hooded; and in the folds of the mage-robe’s hood, the pale blue burning outline of a star like the one that glowed between her own brows. She said, “If you know of any shelter against this possibly god-infested and ghost-harboring quarter, I will follow you to it.”

  Rajene’s voice was a strong and resonant baritone; far deeper than the mellow and sexless contralto of Lythande’s own, though perhaps equally musical. Across the back where Lythande’s lute was strung, Lythande could make out the outline of a chitarrone, an archaic but tuneful instrument almost as tall as the man who bore it
. In fact, of all her fellow Adepts of the Blue Star, there were few Lythande would have rather met on a dark night; for as far as she knew, she had no quarrel with Rajene, and when they were fellow apprentices in the Temple of the Star, they had been friends—or as near to friends as any magician could come to friendship. Which is to say that at the least they were not enemies.

  Lythande had had no true friends there; had dared have none; for alone among all the Pilgrim Adepts from one end of Time to the other, Lythande was a woman; alone and in disguise she had penetrated the secrets of the temple, and only after she bore the Blue Star between her brows had her disguise been exposed. She had paid the highest price ever for the power of a Pilgrim Adept; for when the truth was known, the Master of the Star had laid a doom upon her, thus: “Be then, forever, what you have chosen to be,” he said. “For on that day when your true sex shall be proclaimed aloud by any man save myself, on that day is your power at an end, and your immunity from your fellows.”

  So it had been since that day: a life of perpetual concealment, without relief; an eternal solitude, with none but brief and superficial companionship, such as she might now find for a time with Rajene.

  And now, as if to add to the general bleakness of the deserted and ghost-haunted quarter, the faint mizzling rain began to come down harder into the darkness, blotting out even the semblance of any ordinary night.

  Lythande was not altogether sorry; the drizzle of the past hours would create discomfort, but added nothing to the safety of the darkness; this sudden downpour would send any enterprising footpad or cutpurse back to shelter, or if a thief or assassin were desperate, would make it less likely that an assailant would identify the victim as a Pilgrim Adept. No sane thief would attempt to rob a magician of that stature; but in this darkness and rain they might make the mistake of trying it.

  Rajene tugged the hood of his mage-robe tighter over his head, trying to rearrange the folds to protect the musical instrument.

  “Let us seek shelter,” he said urgently. “I have not visited these parts for many years—I forget quite how many, but if my memory still serves me at all, there was once an old dame who kept a kind of ale-house, and when her public room was not too full, she would allow me to sleep on her floor by the fire. It was not the best shelter, but it was an inestimable improvement over the rain, and this is not such a night as I would willingly sleep under the stars—even if there were any stars to sleep under, which there are not.”

  “Lead on,” Lythande said briefly, “I follow.”

  This was better than she had hoped. She had little fear of women, and she had dwelt among the Adepts of the Blue Star for seven years of her apprenticeship without her true sex being even once suspected or exposed. A large public inn filled with men would have meant a night of endless vigilance; in the company of one fellow Pilgrim Adept and an old woman—and if Rajene’s old acquaintance had been elderly in Rajene’s early days as a magician, she must be truly venerable now—she would have little to fear.

  She followed Rajene’s shadowy form before her, with little light except the pallid glimmer of the Blue Star which shone faintly between her brows, and a similar gleam escaping from beneath Rajene’s concealing hood.

  She tried to protect her lute from the worst of the rain; not easy to do because the spell which kept it dry was a taxing one, and when she concentrated on keeping up with Rajene in the darkness, she tended to lose sight of the spell. At worst it was more important that the lute be kept dry than that her own feet and body be sheltered from rain; they would dry without harm, and the lute would not.

  After what seemed a long time of darkness and rain, stumbling on uneven ground broken with what might have been old sunken gravestones, Lythande made out the dim lights of a cottage; an old and tumbledown building with sagging stone walls and a door of planks so old, split and broken that the firelight streamed out between them. Sheltering out of the wind (which came around the corner of the building with howling violence) Lythande hugged her mage-robe close to her shoulders and thought that even if this place was deserted and the haunt of ghosts or even ghouls, she would have shelter this night from the rain.

  From inside came the sound of a cracked and quavering voice; then the door was pulled open from inside and a stooped old woman stood in the firelight. She was dressed in faded rags and tatters, a much-patched shawl over her bent shoulders being almost more patch than shawl, her face so wrinkled and drawn that Lythande, who was herself immensely old, could not even begin to guess her age.

  “Dame Lura,” cried Rajene, “I am rejoiced to see that you still dwell in this world! I have brought a friend to beg shelter at your fire this night. Had you no longer dwelled here, I was prepared to spend this wild night begging shelter of some poor ghost in his tomb!”

  Dame Lura chuckled, a sound which seemed to Lythande so wild and humorless that it was hardly human.

  “Ah, Rajene, my friend, there is better shelter than that for you here; even if this were no better than a tomb, I would deny shelter neither to the living nor the dead on such a night as this. Come inside, dry yourselves by the fire there.” She gestured them to the hearth where a large rug covered the cold stone, and stretched out on the stone lay two large dogs; hairy and shaggy, sound asleep with their noses to the fire.

  Rajene shoved the nearer dog, black and shaggy, with his foot, and the animal made a sleepy grumbling sound without waking, and scooted a little to one side to make room for Rajene to shed the mage-robe and hang it over a rickety stool which stood at the edge of the hearth-rug. After a moment Lythande did the same, boosting another stool to the fireside and hauling off her own drenched robe. Rajene sat between the dogs, stretching his stockinged feet to the fire and drew the chitarrone to himself, tuning the instrument to make certain it had taken no harm. Lythande pulled off her boots, stretching her narrow feet to the fire. The smaller of the two dogs, a tan and shaggy long-haired bitch, crowded against her, but the animal was warm and friendly and after all it had a better right to the fire than she did.

  Dame Lura pulled a huge cauldron from its crane over the fire and asked, “May I offer ye some supper? And will ye play me a tune on yer lutes?”

  “My pleasure,” muttered Rajene, and began to play an old ballad of the countryside. Lythande discovered that the strings of her lute were soaked with the rain; but she had spare lengths of gut stowed in the many pockets of the mage-robe; she fumbled in them and set about mending and replacing the strings.

  The old woman scooped a ladleful of stew into each of a couple of coarsely carved wood bowls and held one bowl out to Lythande. It smelled delicious, and Lythande, seeing that Rajene was looking into the fire and not at her, ventured a couple of bites. One of the many vows fencing the power of a Pilgrim Adept was that she might neither be seen to eat nor drink in the sight of any man; but the vows did not apply to women and Rajene was not looking at her. She chose to apply the prohibition quite literally, and hastily. While Rajene was bent over his lute and tuning it, she managed to get down a good part of the stew; though when he raised his eyes and asked her to play she at once left off eating.

  “No, you play; I am not familiar with the sound of the chitarrone,” she asked. He seemed gratified by the request, and again bent his face over the lute so that Lythande managed to finish the stew. After that Lythande played and sang but soon began to feel sleepy close to the fire; she covered herself with the mage-robe—which also covered the dogs—and tumbled quickly into sleep. Her last awareness was of the strong smell of wet dog-hair and of Rajene snoring on the rug beside her.

  When she woke she was aware of firelight and silence; she looked up and saw no sign of Rajene, but only of the large dog stretched out on the hearth. Then, about to stretch out, she looked at her hand and her hand was not there; only a hairy tan paw extended toward the fire. Something was wrong with her perspective; she seemed closer to the fire than before. She sprang up, trying to cry out, and heard only a long lugubrious howl. At the sound the other do
g sprang up, barking wildly; and above the dog’s low hairy forehead she saw a pale gleam of blue in the shape of a star. She recognized the other dog; it was Rajene, and she herself had somehow been transformed into the bitch lying beside her on the rug.

  Dame Lura still crouched over her cauldron muttering in some unknown language—or was it only that Lythande could no longer understand human speech? Lythande rushed for the door, on all fours, followed by the other dog who was Rajene.

  Outside it had stopped raining; and by a curious distorted moonlight she raced through the deserted lands, stumbling over gravestones, Rajene racing after her.

  Transformed by sorcery; and since I have become a bitch, Rajene will know I am a woman, she thought, and wondered why she was thinking about that; trapped in animal form she could not even speak a spell to break the enchantment. Or was this the kind of spell which lasted only until sunrise or moonset? But why had nothing warned her of magic in action? The blue star should have warned her of the presence of sorcery. Yet in all justice she realized that the unaccustomed warmth after a cold soaking, the hot food, and her attempt to eat unobserved, had taken her mind from any thought of hostile magic.

  She wondered for a moment if Rajene had betrayed her. No, he himself was victim of the same magic; they had blundered together into the spell.

  Rajene was still racing away in panic; Lythande tried to call out to him but heard only a curious whining growl and desisted almost at once.

  Can this be only a dream? Can it be that I am still lying before the fire in the witch’s cottage, dreaming this? she wondered; but the chill of the graveyard was penetrating the pads on her paws, and there was no change in the dream-surroundings; so this was no dream, but some vicious sorcerous reality, and she—and Rajene—were trapped inside it.