Ashling

by Isobelle Carmody

  It was incredibly noisy on the spit. Everyone seemed to shout at the top of their voice and there was a great deal of bartering that took place literally from ship decks, and a tremendous bustle as people carried boxes and bundles to and from the ships. Yet the scene was, for all its loudness, curiously colorless. The savage blaze of the sun seemed to bleach everything to a blinding bone-whiteness that made my head pound and my eyes water. More than anything else I longed to sit in a bit of shade and drink a cold mug of water.

  Unfortunately the only shade available was that cast by the towering Sadorian cliffs, looming on both sides of the sloping pass that led up to the desert, and that was a goodly step away.

  "We'd better set up some sort of camp," Rushton decided. "Powyrs said Jakoby's ship might well have missed being becalmed but, if not, then we'll miss the time for the Battlegames. If that happens, we'll know we're here for some reason other than the games."

  Powyrs pointed out a spot further up the spit where it widened at the base of the cliffs. "About half way to the cliffs there is a place where visitors set up their tents. You can see them? Nearby are stalls where you can purchase food, and at the very base of the cliffs there is a freshwater spring. The water will cost you nothing, but you will have to change your coins for barter tokens at the Earth-temple if you want to buy food."

  Watching us go, the plump seaman gave Maruman, who was draped around my neck, a long look of bewildered wistfulness that spoke of the strength of his attachment to his "mascot." I had coerced all memory of their brief association from his mind, and from the crew's, but clearly the impression had been deep and some residue remained, at least in Powyrs.

  XXXIX

  Hannay, Rushton and Miryum cleared the rough shale and set about, with the twins' aid, erecting the tents we had bought in Sutrium at Jakoby's suggestion. Daffyd and Freya were sent off to get water, and Fian and I to exchange our small store of coin for Temple barter tokens. Dameon elected to walk with us, and since the spring was on the way to the Temple, we went that far together.

  I was relieved to find that Freya's presence no longer disturbed me near as much as Rushton's. Not that we did much talking. The heat beating down on our heads and thrown back as a reflection from the dazzling white sand was terrific. By the time we reached the cliffs, we were all gasping for breath.

  We threw ourselves down at the edge of the icy spring and drank deeply, before retreating into the dense shade cast by the cliffs to recover.

  "Incredible," croaked Daffyd in a low voice.

  "Where does such heat come from?" Freya asked weakly, fanning her face with her skirts.

  "Ugh," Fian groaned. "I've just realized we'll have to climb up th' rest of th' spit to change th' coins. Powyrs told me th' Temple entrance can only be got to from th' top of the cliffs."

  I would have groaned, too, if I had been able to spare the energy. The first impression of coolness in the shade had begun to abate and already I was hot again. We sat a good while before I could bring myself to move.

  Standing up reluctantly, I noticed two halfbreed gypsies among the throng of Sadorians. They stood out as much as we must in this land of tall, gold-skinned people in their flowing robes. Powyrs had said gypsies were treated well here. That being so, I had no doubt more would avail themselves of the coast road when the poisons had receded a little further.

  Swallow's lean dark face flashed into my mind. He had seemed so sure that we would meet again, but his predictions and strange visions seemed very far away from this hot land.

  "Uh-oh," Fian murmured.

  He had risen, too, and was gazing back down the spit I turned to see what had caught his attention. A number of gray-clad Landsmen stood talking, yellow cloaks fluttering at their shoulders—senior-ranking soldierguards from the Land.

  I had known there were soldierguards in Sador, yet still it was a shock to see them. Even more so the two Herders with them, clad as usual in white robes and arrogance. I was astounded to see a number of Sadorians clustered about the priests. Could these possibly be converts?

  Even as I watched, the taller Herder lifted his pale haughty face to the Earthtemple, his lip curling in scorn. Letting my eyes follow the same direction, I was startled to discover that what I had thought carved patterns on the cliff were, in fact, a multitudinous swirl of faces.

  "You'd better get on," Daffyd advised.

  "Perhaps you should not go," Freya told Dameon, when I offered him my arm.

  The Empath guildmaster smiled unerringly down at her. "I am not ill. I am only blind."

  She flushed.

  "I am going to have another drink before we start," Fian announced.

  Daffyd caught his arm. "Don't be a fool. You will be sick if you fill your belly with water then walk in this heat. Drink when you return."

  It was a steep walk up to the top of the cliffs but Fian found breath enough to describe what he was seeing to Dameon. I was glad of his monologue for it freed me of the need to speak and kept the Empath master's attention from me. Before long, though, we were all trudging along in silence again.

  "The sun is like a hammer on my head," Fian panted, when we stopped to rest halfway. "It did not look so far from the camp. At this rate it will be dusk before we are back."

  My own head was pounding, yet the heat in the desert running back from the cliffs must be a thousand times worse. Still the Sadorians spent their lives sailing the sea of sand on their desert ships. Strange how differently humans could live and still be human.

  The Earthtemple had two faces.

  The grandest was the one it presented to the sea and to the spitroad. We had been sitting literally with our backs against the base of it when we were by the spring. The road from the spit had risen gradually to the height of the clifftop, where a small rocky path had peeled off to the left, running down into a deep fissure. A man had told us this would bring us to the entrance of the Earthtemple. After making our way carefully and with some relief down the shaded path running along a deep sloping cleft, we discovered the second face of the Temple. It was neither gilded nor carved, and there were no windows. A single, rough-hewn portal served as the doorway, while a great, plain slab of stone, set upon a smaller pivoting stone, served as its door. Its simplicity seemed far more in keeping with the Sadorians' philosophy as expounded by Powyrs, than the ornate carved facade of faces it presented to the sea.

  The stone door was currently tilted to allow a slender opening on either side, and beyond the darkness was so complete that it was impossible to say what lay within.

  There were at least thirty people lined up outside in queues. One line seemed to consist of very elderly people, worried-looking adults with sickly children or babes, and others with rough bandages or hacking coughs.

  A young man with wild eyes, held tightly between two plump, distressed-looking women, lashed about babbling and shuddering. Clearly he was undergoing some sort of seizure.

  This then must be the line for supplicants seeking healing.

  The line next to it had more animals than people, therefore this must be where beasts were brought to be examined for disease before they could be sold. The animals were all small, so the larger beasts, such as horses, must be dealt with at some other point.

  In the third line there were Sadorians carrying sacks. The acrid odor rising suggested they Were the spice gatherers Powyrs had mentioned, bringing in their tribe's quota to exchange for barter tokens.

  At first I wondered why the queues were not advancing, then I noticed a number of barefooted men and women clad in hooded linen tunics moving along the lines.

  "The Temple guardians," Fian murmured. "Looks as if all of the ministerin' is done outside." He sounded disappointed.

  I waved him back and moved closer to listen to an exchange between one of the hooded guardians and a Sadorian woman of middle years.

  "What do you seek of the earth?" the Temple guardian asked. His voice and shape proclaimed him a man, but I could not see his face. Like all of t
he Temple guardians, this was concealed by the drooping hood.

  The woman launched into a detailed litany of physical ills to which he listened with great patience. When she could find nothing more to complain about, he rummaged in a small pouch bag tied at his waist, and removed a twig. Pressing it into her hand, he bade her in a gentle voice to soak it in boiled water, then drink the fluid.

  Fian poked me in the ribs, bis eyes bright with suppressed laughter. "It's no more than a wee bit of relaxin' herb he's given her. A sop."

  I nodded absently, wondering what the farthest line was for. People did not look sick, nor did they lead beasts, or carry spice.

  A smaller guardian approached a man in this line.

  "What do you seek of the earth?" asked a girl, her voice muffled slightly by the hood.

  "Wisdom, Guardian. My son desires to bond, but he has yet to make his first spice gather." He seemed undaunted by the fact that the voice could not belong to a girl much older than his son.

  "Is the girl he would take worthy in your eyes?" she asked.

  "Yes, it is only his youth that troubles me," the man answered. "In truth it may be that he is not worthy of her."

  The diminutive guardian nodded sagely. "Say to the father of the girl that he must set the boy a quest to determine his worthiness. If he fails, then he must wait another season. If he succeeds, then he shall have her."

  The father nodded and went away.

  "That's no more'n a bit of common sense. The' man's a fool nowt to have thought of it fer hisself," Fian muttered.

  "Perhaps he had thought of it, but needed reassurance," Dameon murmured.

  Another Temple guardian came out of the shadowy doorway with two clinking bags slung about her waist. She passed briskly along the farthest line, exchanging coin for tokens.

  "Wait here," I said, and took my place at the end of the line. When the guardian reached me, she asked, from the depths of her hood, "What do you seek of the earth?"

  "I... We have come to pay our respects to the earthgoddess and to get some barter tokens," I said politely.

  She nodded and counted the coin I offered into one bag at her waist before giving me a handful of small pale metal discs from another. She lifted her hand to my forehead and made a sign, but the words were drowned out by a scream.

  I turned swiftly to find the frenzied youth had broken free of the women and was rushing toward me.

  I thought he meant to attack me and flung up my hands, but to my astonishment he threw himself at my feet. "Do you bring the Moonwatcher?" he whispered fiercely.

  The two women had hurried forward and pulled him away from me, apologizing profusely. "When these fits come on him, it is as if he is possessed by demons," one said.

  The Temple guardian, who had been attending to me, waved the women and the now silent boy back to their place in the line, then turned to me.

  "Who are you?" she asked in a strange tense voice.

  My heart began to gallop. "I... I am a visitor from the Land"

  "Whom do you visit?"

  I did not know what to answer, so I told the truth. "Jakoby has invited me. She is ..."

  "I know of Jakoby," the woman said shortly, and now her tone was indifferent. She lifted her hand up and made the same mark on my forehead. "May you nurture the earth and find harmony."

  She moved to the man behind me, and I returned to Dameon and Fian, feeling somewhat bewildered.

  "What happened?" Fian demanded.

  "I'm damned if I know," I said.

  As Fian had predicted, the day was indeed drawing to a close by the time we returned to the spit. The shadows were lengthening, and people were lighting cooking fires and lamps. Already the moon had risen, and it hung like a great coppery disc, low on the skyline; a full moon.

  As we reached the trade area, Fian suggested we get some food to take back to the camp. The atmosphere surrounding the selling tents was as familiar as the rest of Sador was strange. In the mill and jostle there was a similarity to markets in Sutrium and Kinraide and Morganna, that reassured me in some deep way. Well, that was not so surprising. After all, people had to eat and drink and trade and speak.

  All about us, men and women were involved in the mundane business of haggling with traders. Here, at least, there were almost as many Landfolk as Sadorians.

  "Got any silver to sell?" demanded a squint-eyed jack. Dameon smiled in the direction of the voice and shook his head. The man recoiled as if his blindness might be contagious.

  "Need flints or salt?" A woman in the tent alongside him asked.

  "Maybe later," I said.

  She spat on the ground in disgust. "Filthy gypsies."

  "Like a girl, pretty boy?" whispered a woman with lustrous painted eyes, peering from the shadowy interior of another tent at Fian.

  He shuddered and backed away with comical haste into one of the odorous desert ships sitting with their legs folded queerly beneath them. The creature snorted fiercely and eyed him with pouting ire.

  "Greetings," I sent, wondering if its mind would accept me.

  It regarded me for a long moment, but either could not or would not understand.

  "You want to buy this fine animal?" a Sadorian trader asked, appearing from nowhere at the beast's side.

  "I don't think he likes the color of my eyes," I said, and walked on leaving him to stare after me.

  "How can they live in this heat?" Fian panted. "It's practically dusk. Doesn't it ever cool down?"

  "I suspect the night will be cold," Dameon said.

  Fian snorted as if coolness here was something no sane person would believe in. "They are mad, of surety, to live in such a place."

  "Perhaps so," said a familiar voice.

  I whirled to find myself staring at a tall woman, clad in a flowing cloak of beaten animal hides atop a thin shift of some golden material that matched her eyes, and bared the full dark muscular length of legs and arms. Her hair was woven into tight, metal-beaded braids which clinked whenever she moved.

  "Jakoby," I said.

  Rushton bowed. "I am pleased to greet you. Elspeth has told us so much about you. We feared you might have been becalmed, as we were."

  "The winds were good to us." Jakoby smiled enigmatically, her face illuminated fitfully by the fire Miryum had kindled in the angled embrace of the tents. The others stared at the Sadorian woman in wonder. She looked about at them, taking time to examine each of the faces carefully.

  "Your chosen warriors are young indeed," she said at last. "But age does not always signify, as the Landman, Elii, said. Will you come now? The two of you," Jakoby asked.

  "I think Rushton..." I faltered under his green glare.

  "We will be glad to accompany you," he told Jakoby tersely. "Where do we go?"

  "To meet Bram. He is to judge the Battlegames. He will explain the rules of the games. They will commence tomorrow at dawn."

  "Are all of the rebels here?" Rushton asked Jakoby.

  "Not all, but all who will come. More, I think, than Brydda expected. The last of them came by ship with us and we moored only this evening. It was fortunate that we had a good wind at our back, since we were a day late in departing."

  We were turning to leave when I heard Miryum's voice ring out angrily, and the sound of a blow.

  Hurrying around to the back of one of the tents, we discovered the stolid Coercer guilden standing over a tall Sadorian man sitting in the dust, his nose running with blood.

  "What happened?" Rushton demanded.

  "Him," Miryum said fiercely, glaring at the man as he got to his feet

  "What did he do?" I asked.

  Miryum looked over to me and promptly dissolved into confusion. "He ... this fellow was making fun of me," she muttered wrathfully.

  "This is not so," the man said carefully. He bowed low to her and then to Jakoby. "I am sorry if I have given offense. I spoke ravek. I did not mean to insult her. Do you wish me to kill myself?"

  Miryum gaped.

  "Well?"
Jakoby asked her mildly. "Do you want him to kill himself for insulting you?"

  "But surely you can't mean he would... would..." The coercer looked more disturbed than I had ever seen her. "Of course he mustn't... kill himself. Not for a joke."

  "Very well, you may leave," Jakoby told the man indifferently.

  "It was not a joke I made," the man said gravely. He bowed to Miryum, and then again to Jakoby before backing away.

  "What on earth did he say to you?" I asked.

  Miryum reddened. "I will not say."

  "Shall we go?" Jakoby murmured. "Bram is expecting us. It is only a short walk to his tent."

  The Sadorian walked slowly, adapting her long stride courteously to our pace.

  "What is a ravek?" I asked her.

  Her teeth flashed in the darkness of her face. "It is an endearment between those who are heartfasted. It means you-who-have-my-heart-beneath-your-foot. The man your friend struck offered to make her his ravek. That is a formal proposal of bonding in Sador."

  In spite of everything, I smiled. Obviously Miryum had thought the poor fellow was cursing at her in his language. What would she say when I told her he wanted her for his bondmate?

  Rushton began asking Jakoby questions about Sador, but I only half listened. I wondered if I should speak of the disturbed boy outside the Earthtemple that afternoon.

  I felt as if the incident had meant something. Certainly the Temple guardian, who had witnessed the scene, seemed to have been worried by it.

  Jakoby stopped before a large tent.

  She lifted the tent flap, and the muted sounds of laughter and the clink of plates and knives spilled out into the dusk. She gestured for us to enter.

  Inside, a fire burned in a ground hearth lined in stone. Three trestles were set around it in a u-shape and piled high with all manner of food and drink. Seated at the trestles were both familiar and unfamiliar faces.

  At the central table on a raised dais was a wizened Sadorian man with skin the shade of old bronze and hair as white and tightcoiled as the fleece of wild mountain goats. He wore a cloak of what appeared to be animal pelts sewn together about his skinny shoulders, as Jakoby did.