I lifted the flap and went in.
It was a big tent, the inside leather painted too, with red running deer, and high up a sunburst, which meant power. There were fine rugs on the floor, low chairs, and I recognized the carved table I had seen in the village. The five men glanced up, interested. Darak looked me hard in the face, then continued with what he had been saying. Ignoring that I had been ignored, I walked to a vacant chair—more stool than chair, but there was no help for that—and sat down.
They had taken their cue from Darak. They ignored me, and the talk went on—elaborate plans, which were really very simple in essence, of how they should get the stuff along the South Road, sell it in part before Ankurum, their goal, and what was to be done in Ankurum itself. It was a dangerous adventure.
Their eyes were alight. The jug came around and I took it as it was bypassing me, and, easing it up under the folds of the shireen, drew a mouthful from one of the open tubes set in the sides. I did not want this drink, but that jug—one of their symbols—could not be let by so easily. I swallowed the viscous, bitter swill, wanting only to spit it out, then handed the jug on to the man it had been going to. There was a little silence. Then Darak stood up. He looked strange, nobler in the black full tunic, black leggings and boots.
“Drink, and get out,” he said pleasantly to his captains.
The discussion was over. They had covered all points, but I guessed a meeting such as this would have gone on much longer normally. They would have perfected details, unnecessarily perhaps, told jokes and stories of other ventures, and drunk very deep.
Now the men got up. They went past me uneasily, once outside, laughed and blundered around in some horseplay or other.
“What does the goddess want?”
He was abrupt, uneasy as they.
“To hear your plans. I am tired of knowing only a moment or so before we move.”
“It was a meeting beteen the chief and his people. Not for goddesses,”
I thought, I can go now be free of him. I must go, must be free. Already there is blood on me, and willbe more unless I go. And he does not want me.
But I said lightly: “The gods must be everywhere, Darak. Next time you will not send them away when I come in.”
He went to the tent flap, threw the lees of the beer across the grass. Coming in, he tied the flap shut, and began to strip ready to sleep. When he did this, it was somehow insulting. Every muscle flick, brazier gleam on his naked torso was a jeer at me. He began to pull off the high boots, slowly, with great care.
“I suppose you’ll stay,” he said.
They have such pride in their sex, these men and women, that there must always be dignity and battle in it. He expected me to untie the tent flap and march out, my back stiff with fury, but it was no matter to me.
“I will stay,” I said.
He stood up and moved quickly over to me. He seized my arm, and his fingers and thumb were like five iron talons in my flesh,
“Did you make the mountain burn?”
It astonished me, this superstition again, festering in him.
“No,” I said.
But I was not sure. The curse had gone out with me from the volcano, so Karrakaz had promised me.
“The villages, all of them. That second time there would be nothing left,” he said.
I touched his face with my free hand.
Quite calmly now, and with precision, he began to undress me. When everything lay on the floor, he went to the brazier and pulled down its lid. The light turned smoky and purple.
“Take off the mask,” he said to me.
I felt utter panic then. Before I could move, he came at me, got my hands, and the mask, and wrenched it free. Air, cool and burning on my face. I screamed, again and again, struggling to get my hands free to cover myself, my eyes tight shut. His own hand came hard over my mouth and nostrils to stifle the screaming. I could not seem to breathe, and was losing consciousness, still struggling like a fish in its awful agony on a hook. All my being seemed to be struggle and terror, and behind my lids I saw that mirror under the volcano, and the devil-demon-beast that looked back at me from its burned-white eyes.
It was good for him, I suppose. He was conquering me in my fear, and his own fears, too. I felt him, but it was some thing done to me, disgusting in its remoteness.
I swam back to the tent from the darkness. I do not know how long it had lasted, but not long, I think.
He lay by me, but he had put the shireen in my hand. I understood him, and what he had done, but it made no difference to me then. I held the shireen tight, but did not put it on. Tears ran down into my hair, but it seemed not to be I who wept them.
“No man and woman can lie together as we did,” he said. “This”—he touched the shireen—“has a face of its own, staring at me. Go masked with others, not with me. I saw you before. You can’t be secret from me; every beauty and ugliness and strangeness and difference of yours is mine by right if I have a right to your body.” His hand slid between my thighs, but not to my sex. “You weren’t afraid to let me find this in the dark—or rather to find the absence of it. A woman, but not human. Listen,” he said, but no more after that. He leaned and kissed my mouth, which he had never done before. I opened my eyes.
His face, so near mine, was gentle, almost tender. There was no repulsion in it.
Life leaped in me, for there was no repulsion in it.
I saw that he had set me free of something, with him at least, but chained me too, of course. It was a happiness for me, but a conquest for him—of both of us. But nothing mattered. I let the shireen drop away, and put my arms around him instead.
2
Darak rode a little ahead of the caravan, and I, astride one of the smaller merchant horses, rode at his side from then on. Maggur and Kel came behind me, a handful of Darak’s men behind him. At evening, when we halted, he would try my fighter’s skill and my skill with the bow. But I was excellent with both; Maggur and the others had been good teachers.
“You have eyes like a hawk,” Darak told me. With the bow I was better than he, but it did not seem to trouble him, surprisingly. He knew his hold on me, I imagine. At night we were lovers in the tent, and later, when the River Road, days away from the river, found the South Road, and the nightmares began, he was very good to me.
It was strange, the way we came to it. We had followed the track so long I was used to its roughness, and the undergrowth which strangled it in the woods, the drifts of loose soil blown across it on the plains.
It was a dull hot day, the sky full of black hammerheads bringing the first of the autumn storms. We rode through a little scrubby tangle of bushes, over a small rise among rocks, and the track faded away like a snail’s trail in front of us.
Beyond the rocks, the ground stretched open and flat, and on the horizon stood up two giant pillars, the same brownish color as the plains. Once they had been even taller, now the tops were split and crumbled away, but still towered over thirty feet above our heads. There was carving on them, some deep, some surface, most of which was weathered smooth. I had ridden ahead to them, and Darak had followed me, waving the others back, I suppose, for they did not come up for some time. My face, in its daytime mask, could have told him nothing, but perhaps he knew me enough now that he could sense my thoughts.
I got down and put my hands on the stone. Ancient, ancient, far-back greatness seemed to throb through the pillar I touched. I was cold and burning as I traced the figures of birds and lions, dragons and serpents. A hollow giddiness went through me. I shut my eyes, and under the lids the pillars stood whole, ten feet higher, with capitals of phoenixes and flames.