Daughters of the Great Star

by Diana Rivers

  “Go,” Renaise said quickly. “It is for Shalamith who has risked so much for us. Surely she deserves whatever we can give her. I can easily enough find someone else to dish out potatoes.” I got up reluctantly. As I walked away with Alyeeta, I could already hear Renaise calling out for someone to come and take my place.

  Though it ate at me, I did not ask Alyeeta what ailed Shalamith. We walked in silence. I was locked in the confusion of my feeling for Alyeeta, fear and wariness so at war in me with love and trust that I could not speak at all until Alyeeta said, “I did them no harm, Tazzi. After all, I am a Witch. It is hard never to use my powers, especially when the temptation is so great. And look, there has been peace here for a little while. They can band together now that they have me to be afraid of.”

  I looked around me. What she said was true enough, at least for that moment. I could see Pell conversing earnestly with Murghanth, Teko and two or three of the other “sewer-rats” on the far side of the fire pit. None of them were even raising their voices. Kazouri had Crusher out by the edge of the clearing. She was humming loudly and brushing him with long vigorous strokes while he tried to rub his head against her. A new shelter was being set up under the trees with several of the Star-Born working together. Women were beginning to line up for the evening meal. Far off someone was playing a ferl. Someone else played a flute in a way that made my heart ache with memory. I nodded and looked up to meet Alyeeta’s eyes. I was not prepared for the hurt I saw there. “Please take me to Shalamith,” I said softly. Then, with a sudden quick gesture, I took her hand and kissed it.

  We went to a stump chamber at the far end of the shelter. The light there was dim. When Alyeeta lit a small lamp I had to cover my mouth to keep myself from crying out. Who was this old woman lying there with gray hair and skin so white it looked transparent? It was not white like Shokarn skin, but white as bleached cloth, white as if all her blood had been sucked away. Her eyes were deeply sunk into their sockets, with a circle of dark purple shadows around them. At first it seemed as if she gazed into some immeasurable inner distance and was lost to us there. Then she turned her gaze on me and I knew she saw me very clearly. I had never looked into her eyes before. It had not been possible when she shimmered with glamour even to look full into her face. What I saw in her eyes frightened me. I covered her old frail hand with mine. “Oh, Shalamith, what have you done to yourself for our sakes?”

  “Emptied the well, girl,” she said hoarsely but still with some of the old sweet music in her voice. “Will you help me fill it up again? It may take a while. I need the touch of your healing hands.”

  Something moved in the dark corner. I heard Telakeet say with malice, “They are not worth one hair on your head, Sweet One, none of them, especially this one. I warned you it was dangerous to throw all your force that way against a sealed gate.” Telakeet came over to glower at me as if I was the one at fault for this.

  “So you did,” Shalamith said and for just a moment I thought I heard her musical laugh and saw the slightest tinge of color on her cheek. Telakeet picked up her toad and went out, brushing against me roughly as she passed.

  “Shalamith,” I said, bending close so she could hear me with no strain, “I will do whatever I can for you, whatever you want or need, but I have killed twice with these hands. I do not know if you want them on you. I am not sure there is any healing left in them.”

  “Here, come sit by me.” She put one pale hand on my arm and the cold of it bit right through to my bones. “I have probably killed also by opening those gates or at least made death possible that night. None of us is innocent. I welcome your hands and have no fear of them. Put one here on my forehead and one on my heart.”

  I sat that way for a long while with no sense of time and no thought but sending out warmth and life, or actually no thought at all. Finally Alyeeta pressed her hand on my shoulder, startling me back to myself. “Enough, girl. Any more and you will drain yourself too much. Then you will be of no use to anyone. Telakeet will sit with her now.” I stood up obediently, but it was very hard for me to leave her.

  Alyeeta and I walked back to the stump that was her bedchamber through a shelter already crowded with sleepers. As we were sitting on her bed undressing, I remembered my reluctance to come with her that day. “Oh, Alyeeta, when will I understand that I will love you no matter what you do?”

  “Not so, Tazzi,” she spoke quickly, almost with anger, or perhaps with fear. “There are things one should not be loved past, things that are not forgivable. I have seen enough of them in this life. Goddess grant that I have done no such things and never will, but if I do then I do not deserve your love or any other. You must not go on loving me then, remember that, and you yourself must be the judge of that moment.”

  I was so startled by her reply I felt as if I had lost my balance and was falling. It took me a moment or so to steady myself. Then I grinned at her suddenly, “Do I never ever say the right thing, Alyeeta?”

  “Yes, of course, you often say the right thing. It is only that each time I have to add my own one more thing to it. My bad habit, no fault of yours. Now get under the covers and I will bring you some tea to help restore your strength and give you a good night’s rest.”

  When she came back I sat with the cup nestled in my hands. “How is it that Shalamith is ill and you are not, when you both opened the gate?” I asked her.

  Alyeeta shook her head, “I did not open the gate, child. It is Shalamith who did the work. I was the anchor, the holder, the safe steady place, the rock. She was the one who went out and out and out into the realm of risk. It is not the rock that wearies itself but the bird that flies against the storm.”

  After that, no matter what else my duties were, I went to sit with Shalamith for a part of every day. Often Telakeet was there. She would try to drive me off with some insulting bitter words. I knew she was jealous of my closeness with Alyeeta and now there was another for her to be jealous of, but if Shalamith wanted me there I would not let myself be dislodged.

  It was the most peaceful part of my day. I poured out into her whatever I had left of healing since she seemed so willing to accept it. When I went away I was drained, but also strangely filled. Little by little some of her golden color began to come back. Her hair was no longer gray but a pale shade of yellow, so that I began to wonder if that gray had been real or only some trick of the light. The golden glow was even returning to her skin. Her hands were warmer now. She looked younger. There was music in her voice again and a tinge of pink in her cheeks. One day when I came in, she drew me forward and kissed me lightly on the lips, saying, “Little Tazzi, you see, you are a better healer than you thought. Just look how well you have done with me.” She looked almost like her old self again.

  I blushed to the roots of my hair. The heat of that kiss rushed down through my body and lodged between my legs. That night I asked Alyeeta, “Are you never jealous of Shalamith?”

  “Jealous?” she sounded puzzled. “Child, she is my comrade, the sister of my heart. We have been through things together you could not even begin to imagine. I wish her whatever happiness she can find in this life. I can no more be jealous of Shalamith than my right hand can be jealous of my left.” As she said those words, I myself felt some jealousy. I saw that under the banter the Witches had with each other, there lay a depth of feeling I could not share and did not begin to understand.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I need to make some accounting of the raid and this, I suppose, is as good a time as any, an accounting of what we lost and what we gained on that one wild night in Eezore. First off, in terms of loss, Irdris did not come back. Even now it is very hard for me to write that down and see those words before me on the paper. She was missing, as were four or five others I scarcely knew, and I was likely the last of us to have seen her. Also there was Askarth’s death sitting so heavy on me that I had not yet spoken of it, could not bring myself to speak of it, though I knew I must do so soon. These were small los
ses, I suppose, for a raid of such size against such odds. A trained fighting man, a commander of the guards, hardened to death, would no doubt have been very proud to have come away with so little lost, weighed against so much risked. How easily we could all have been lost in that city, swallowed up by Eezore like so many minnows sucked into the maw of a gramorghi fish. We should think ourselves lucky to have gotten off so lightly. But I kept hearing Irdris’s last words in my head, seeing her slipping away into the night, remembering again how I had wanted to warn her not to go when, in fact, she was already gone.

  For the first day or so, before I knew for certain, I thought I saw her with each new blond head that appeared. I would be about to call out her name eagerly when that woman would turn toward me or come closer and I would see a Shokarn stranger in her place.

  On my second night back, while we were all eating together, I leaned toward Maireth. Speaking very low, almost in a whisper, I asked, “Where is Irdris? Why is she not here among us?” After Pell’s very public rebuke, I was shy of bringing any notice on myself.

  Maireth turned and looked at me with pity in her eyes. “You did not know? You were not told?” She shook her head. “No one has seen her since the raid. None of the watchers saw her come out through the gates. She has not been reported in any of the other camps. We think she may have died in Eezore, though one can still hope...”

  Maireth also spoke very low, but Ashai on the other side of her must have heard it all for instantly she began wailing in her strangely accented Kourmairi, “Gone, gone, gone. You took her back into the city to die. I told her not to go. I told her...I told her...I told her...”

  Maireth turned to her to say, “Ashai, no one forced her. She herself asked to go back, she even insisted on it, saying there was something she must do there.”

  Ashai was not listening. She had jumped up, knocking over her bowl. With a cry she ran off into the darkness, her words, “Gone, gone, gone,” echoing back at us.

  I did not cry or shout. I sat there with a terrible cold weight on my chest. How was I to believe this? Gone! Irdris gone! Irdris no longer in this world? Kind, loving, gentle Irdris. I sometimes thought she was the very best of us. So Eezore had gotten her after all. I sat there remembering again how I had wanted to warn her not to go. But would it have mattered anyhow? Would she have listened to me? I had begged Askarth to stay with us and now I could not even speak of the manner of her death.

  As to Askarth, every time I saw Nunyair it was a torture to me. I would do my best to shield while she asked me persistently, “But where is Askarth? Tazzi, what do you think delays her so? She promised she would be here with us.” It was true that camp life was hard for Nunyair, harder perhaps than for the rest of us, but I could not give her any comfort. All I could give her was my silence or my terrible truth. Sometimes, sleeping with Alyeeta, I would wake with a sudden cry and she would reach to comfort me. I did not tell her what woke me, but surely she must have seen it in my mind.

  Enough of losses now. Better to speak of our gains, much better. No matter how I mourned Irdris and Askarth, and grieved for those others who had not returned, I knew that on any reasonable scale our gains far, far outweighed our losses. By springing open the gates of Eezore, we had freed more than two hundred Star-Born that we knew of. And who knows how many more were still out there wandering in search of us. Everyday we sent out patrols to look for them. The stragglers were still coming in.

  Of those we could account for, we had gathered thirty or more “sewer-rats” or Sheezerti as they called themselves, those who were not slaves, but had no other caste or class and lived by their wits, mostly on the streets. Over fifty of “the Circle” had been freed, young women who wore pendants like the one Maireth had given me. They were mostly daughters of the middle castes, artisans and trades people, Star-Born who had long been aware of their powers and had worked together training them in secret, waiting for this time to come. At least eighty or more had escaped from the Great-Houses, Star-Born of all castes and class from very white skinned Shokarn Uppercaste like Nunyair to Kourmairi slaves and servants as dark or darker than myself. Added to that we had a scattering of those who had been saved and hidden from the guard by their families, as well as a few Wanderers, some Potters and several Muinyairin who had been trapped in the city by the sealing of the gates. We even had eight or ten young women from the Thieves Guild who seemed to know Pell or at least knew her name and regarded her as their bandit chief. And six or seven new burned ones were being cared for in Pell’s shelter by Amelia and other healers, which of course was where Maireth wanted to be rather than in camp playing at being second-in-command. All in all, as I said, more than two hundred safely out of Eezore though they were not all with us. Many had gone on already to other gatherings north or south of us or to Yaniri’s, the new camp to the west.

  In addition to all this, I should speak of the horses. Though we had lost eight or nine of our own, each horse some woman’s loved companion, as Marshlegs had been mine, yet we had gained a far greater number from Eezore that night. Zenoria said we had near doubled our number. Rishka alone had ridden out with at least thirty, many more had poured out of the city that night and followed us up into the hills. We were still gathering in some that had been wandering loose. Zenoria and her horse-women had all they could do caring for them and finding pastureland. Beside that we had gathered jewels, gold, and other valuables, whatever each woman had been able to come away with. “Not bad for one night’s work,” as Pell kept saying, rubbing her hands together. The master thief was in her glory.

  Balanced on the other side was the pressing need for food, for clothing, for bedding, for dishes and pots and pans, for pastureland and food for the horses, for space, for time, for silence, for everything! Goddess knows I should have been thankful it was done and over and we were safely back, most of us that is, but it surely left a great swirl of confusion, especially for those who had the running of the camp to deal with.

  And the stories! The stories and stories and stories that I heard at that time, more stories than I could possibly remember. Each of us had our own story of that night and each new woman was a story in herself, how she had survived in the city and how she escaped, all as worthy of setting down on paper as anything I am writing here. And there were many terrible, heart-crushing stories, too, stories of burnings and of women traps, accounts of all those ingenious and inventive ways they had found to take our lives in spite of our powers.

  I heard several times how Pell had gone over the Great-House wall on a wildly swinging rope ladder to rescue Dorcaneesi and the rest of the women from that house while others made a commotion in the street to distract the guard. I had to tell many times of Rishka’s wild ride and it became wilder with each telling. I even heard my own story, the tale of my encounter with the soldiers told first by Hamiuri and then by others. Often Hamiuri would be so overcome with laughter she could not finish. Though she said scathing things to me directly, she bragged of me to others, saying that there must have been near a hundred men in her clearing and that I had driven them off single-handed with the use of her three aged snakes. “Those poor old creatures that have not a tooth left to bite with among the lot of them.” Soon it was two hundred men or more. She particularly liked telling this when Pell was among the listeners.

  As to Eezore itself, a few days after my return, Hereschell rode in to bring us news of the city. This time he came announced and escorted by a sentry. I could sense Soneeshi in the woods. Occasionally, I caught a glimpse of gray through the trees, but she did not venture into the clearing with so many of us there.

  When Hereschell sat down to eat with us that night, some of the new women were gaping openly at him and whispering behind their hands. In spite of this he did not play dumb or play the fool that night. Rather he talked freely and seemed in a rare jovial mood, carrying on a lively banter with Alyeeta who sat opposite him. At some point, he raised his mug in salute to Pell. “Well, friend of thieves and chief of the st
ar-brats, who would have believed it! You really did it! You went with sixty women and cracked open the Zarn’s city like a nut shell. Eezore is still picking itself up. It was all in chaos after you left. Whatever Shalamith did to those gates, it took three days to force them closed again. People poured out like water. Many will not go back, slaves, guards, even some Highborn. There were many new Wanderers made that night. If the Zarn presses too hard, there will be many more. And as to the Thieves Guild, the thieves had themselves a fine holiday while all of Eezore was running about the streets. Now the Zarn and the Great-Houses are struggling to make peace, as neither feels strong enough to conquer the other. Besides, I hear that what they each sought to hold has slipped through their fingers like water. But take care, if they make their bargains—and I think they will—then they may well come after you with redoubled fury. You still have a while of safety, but do not wait too long.”

  I was just wondering if Merrik had been killed or spared or maybe praised for his work that night, when Hereschell turned to me. “And no, Tazzi, Eezore did not burn down that night, not even close to it, though it took a while for all the fires to be put out. It is the thatched huts of the poor folk that catch on fire easily, not the great stone houses of the rich and powerful. It will take a lot more than that to bring Eezore down. You were a fool to stay and watch.”

  I blushed and ducked my head. “Please, Hereschell,” I mumbled, “I already know that and so do all the rest of us.”

  “Ah well, we are all fools when we are young. How else would we make the mistakes we need to learn from when we are older? Better to be a young fool than an old fool any day.” Then he turned back to the rest of the table and raised his mug again. “To Shalamith, the Shining Lady, who opened the sealed gate of Eezore.” We all raised our mugs with shouts and cheers.