“My lady?”
“You are a servitor of Thumis and not of my Goddess Avanthe. Yet both are of the Lords of Stability. Advise me, therefore, upon a matter of propriety.” A silhouetted hand moved within the blackness of the litter. “I grow bored riding in this conveyence day after day. My limbs ache with its jouncing, and the heat within these curtains is enough to melt even the Shield of Vimuhla, Lord of Fire.” (Harsan thought: the woman is educated, as glib as any temple priestess.) She continued, “Now tell me this: is it fitting for me to join your circle for the morning and evening meals? I wish no dishonour to my clan nor inconvenience to your merchants, yet I do yearn for a chance to move about…”
Harsan hesitated. Some northern Chakan clans, he knew, guarded their womenfolk as zealously as any heap of gold in a treasure-vault, hemming them all about with veils and guards and eunuchs. Those of the south, on the other hand, paid — little heed when their ladies walked abroad bare-breasted and bold amongst strange men. Nor, it was said, did they care overmuch about the paternity of the inevitable results. Custom in Tumissa and the western cities lay somewhere betwixt these two extremes.
He temporised. “My Lady, this must depend upon the practice of one’s clan. While some see nothing amiss in allowing a clan-daughter to exercise her limbs on a long journey and to alleviate the tedium with conversation, others find such behaviour brazen and ill-omened. Surely the tradition of your clan is better known to you than to an outsider such as myself.”
“True, but in this matter I have little to guide me. At home we girls are granted considerable liberty. But this is the first time in my memory that one of us has been married outside Tumissa, and I recall no precedent.”
“What commandments, then, were given to your attendants by your father or clan-patriarchs when you set forth?”
“Why, to serve me, to protect me from harm, and to see me safe into the house of my clan-cousin, noble Retlan hiVriyen of Bey Sii.” There was a hint of what sounded like suppressed amusement in the girl’s voice.
Priestly dialectics came to Harsan’s aid. “If these are the precise words, then the first and last clauses have no application. The second injunction, too, is of little relevance. You are certainly ‘protected from harm’ by your clan’s travel contract with the merchant Mnesun. He and his colleagues will do all possible to honour their agreement, for to act otherwise would bring shame upon their clans; they would be open to a lawsuit and demands for Shamtla — money paid to satisfy a grievance or to compensate for a crime-would follow. None would trust them thereafter. Barring the untoward, thus, there is no question of ill befalling you in this company.”
“Then?”
“Ah-surely the needs of a healthy person for exercise and the desire for decorous and instructive conversation cannot be classified as ‘ill.’ ” Harsan knew not quite where this path led, but logic seemed to point in this direction.
“I see, I see. My thanks for having unriddled the matter so clearly, wise priest. Henceforth I shall join you for meals, and you shall enlighten me further in questions of ethics and theology, areas in which I lamentably lack instruction.”
The Lady Eyil clapped her hands, and Harsan had a fleeting glimpse of slender wrists encircled by golden bangles. One of the attendants rose-the woman Tsatla-and bowed Harsan back to his sleeping mat beside the greying coals of the cook-fire.
All night long he kept seeing images of lithe wrists, tapering fingers, and narrow gold bangles.
Thereafter the Lady Eyil graced their meals. Attired in a voluminous overcloak of blue Giidru- cloth, she sat demurely to one side of the circle, gruff and silent Tsatla ever just behind her. (As one of the Mu’ugalavyani brothers put it: “Like the demon Tusu’u, who hovers ever at the shoulder of the Goddess Dlamelish…”) Lady Eyil took little part in their conversations but listened with apparent interest to their recountings of profits and losses, goods and caravans, cities and peoples. She was unfailingly courteous, using the “you of perfect piety” to Harsan, as was fitting for a priest much more learned than he, and the “you of pleasant dealings” to the merchants, even including the Shen, upon whom such niceties may well have been lost. The thirty-four pronouns for “you” of the Tsolyani language made the maintenance of such social distinctions easy.
None could dispute that the Lady Eyil was a Tumissan. She had the heart-shaped face, pointed chin, wide and mobile mouth, and long, heavy-lashed eyes of the women of the west. She was as long-legged and lithe as Harsan himself, small-breasted, and perhaps a trifle narrow through the hips for Tsolyani tastes. Her mane of black hair often escaped the confines of her cloak, and she restrained it with a headband of blue, proclaiming her allegiance to the goddess Avanthe.
Day pursued day across the hot, fertile plains of the Tsolyani heartland. Harsan walked more and more beside the litter of the Lady Eyil, or, better yet, tramped with her upon the grey river of the Sakbe road. Their discussions grew ever longer. She knew little of theology and the arts Harsan had been taught in the Monastery of the Sapient Eye, but she bubbled like a cookpot with the doings of the clans and lower nobility of Tumissa.
Harsan was intrigued. He was no stranger to women. The monastery contained both male and female clerics and acolytes, and there was no objection to friendly couplings, experimentation, or to marriage. Yet most of the girls of his experience had been fellow students involved in the same studies and pursuits, or else had been the village girls of the Chakas, unlettered, earthy, and quite unabashed before the mysteries of sexuality. Here, however, was a girl who cut her meat daintily with a tiny knife, who never put more than the first knuckles of her right hand into her food, who quoted romantic verses gleaned from the ladies of the governor’s court, and who chattered of etiquette and formalities as alien to Harsan as the sun is to the black depths of the sea.
At times she asked Harsan questions which betrayed her ignorance of even the most fundamental matters of knowledge and religion. This unsettled him somewhat. Was her religious training then no more than a veneer? What was education in the Empire coming to? He put it down to the well-known apathy to abstract wisdom prevalent amongst the better clans and the aristocracy and answered her questions as simply and faithfully as he could.
“Priest Harsan,” she asked one day, “in our great temple of Avanthe at Tumissa there are shrines to many of the Goddess’ Greater Aspects: Sunrudaya the Young Bride, Ngachani the Patroness of Mothers With Babes, and a score of others. Why is it that the Goddess appears in so many forms if She is but one person? Once, when I was a child, I asked our clan’s house-priest, but he replied with such weighty words that I understood him not.”
“My Lady, it is because your Goddess holds sway over all that concerns women in their relation to society,” he replied. “She is the newborn baby girl, the innocent who suffers the first coming of the blood, the maiden in the ecstasy of love, the new-married girl who goes in to her husband for the first time, the wife, the mother, the sister, and finally the clan-mother wise in years and great in honour in her household. Avanthe is all of these and more: the fertility of the crops, the forces of nature, the creatures of the forests, the fish of the rivers. We who are unable to conceive of her oneness all at once can perceive her better through her diversity.”
“Then what of Dilinala, her Cohort? Is she not ‘woman’ as well?”
“Yes, but in different spheres. Dilinala does not participate in home, children, and clan. She is ever-virginal, ever-chaste, celibate, free from the eternal duality of woman and man. She is woman focussed inward upon herself. She is separate from Avanthe, yet a part of the whole.”
“I am not intrigued by Dilinala.” Lady Eyil pushed back her thick, heavy tresses, a pleasingly feminine gesture that Harsan did not fail to note. “Further, then, if Avanthe and Dilinala make up ‘woman,’ tell me what functions are served by the Goddess Dlamelish and her Cohort, Hrihayal?”