Bradley, Marion Zimmer - SSC 03 (15 page)

 
          
The
woman ahead of her, bearing a sick child, was standing now before the priestess
of the Larith who accepted gifts for the shrine. The woman tried to hand her a
golden bracelet, but the priestess shook her head.

 
          
"The
Goddess accepts gifts only from her own, my sister. Larith the Compassionate
bestows gifts upon the children of men, but does not accept them. You would
have healing for your son? Go through yonder door into the outer court, and one
of the healers there shall give you a brew for his fever; the Goddess is
merciful."

 
          
The
woman murmured thanks and knelt for a blessing, and Lythande was looking into
the eyes of the priestess.

 
          
"I
bring you
—
your own," said
Lythande, and fumbled at the strings that bore the
larith
sword. For
the first time, she looked at it clearly and found she was cradling it in her
fingers as if reluctant to let it go. The priestess said, in her gentle voice,
"How have you come by this?"

 
          
"One
of your own lay violated and dying; she spelled this sword to me that I should
return it here."

 
          
The
priestess
—
she was old, Lythande
thought; not as old as Lythande, but no magical immunity gave her the
appearance of youth
—
said gently, "Then you
have our thanks, my sister." Her eyes rested on the reluctance with which
Lythande's fingers released the blade. Her voice was even
more
gentle
.

 
          
"You
may remain here if you will, my sister. You may be trained in the ways of the
sword and of magic, and will wander the world no more alone."

 
          
Here?
Within walls?
Among women?
Lythande
felt her lip curling again with scorn, and yet her eyes ached. /
f
/
had not forgotten how, I would
think 1 were about to weep.

           
"I thank you," she forced
herself to say thickly, "but I cannot. I am pledged elsewhere."

 
          
"Then
I honor what oath keeps you, Sister," the priestess said, and Lythande
knew she should turn from the shrine. Yet she made no move to go, and the
priestess asked her softly, "What would you have from the Goddess in
return for this great gift?"

 
          
"It
is *no gift," said Lythande bluntly. "I had no choice, or I would not
have come; surely you must know that your
larith
swords do not await a
freely given pilgrimage. I came at the
larith's
will, not my own. And
you have no gifts I seek."

 
          
"Gifts
are not always asked," said the priestess, almost inaudibly, and laid her
hands in blessing on Lythande's brow. "May you be healed of the pain you
cannot speak, my
sister.
"

 
          
I
am no sister of yours!
But Lythande did not speak the words aloud; she
pressed her lips tight against them, and saw blue lights glare against the
priestess's fingers. Would the woman expose her, recognizing the Blue Star? But
the woman only made a gesture of blessing, and Lythande turned away.

 
          
At
least it was over. Her venture into the Larith shrine was ended, and now she
must get out safely. She held her breath as she recrossed the great mosaic
floor with the pattern of stars. She passed beneath the doorway and out of the
shrine. Now, standing again in the free light of Keth, trailed down the sky by
the eye of Reth, she had come safe and free from this adventure of someone
else's magic.

 
          
And
then a cynical voice cut through her sense of sudden peace.

 
          
"By all the gods, Lythande!
So the Shadow is at his old
trick of thievery and silence? And you have forced yourself into this alien
shrine? How much of their gold did you cozen from their shrine, O
Lythande?"

 
          
The
voice of Beccolo! So even in women's garments, he had recognized her! But of
course he would think it only the most clever and subtle of disguises.

 
          
"There
is no gold in the shrine of the Larithae," she said in her most mellow
tones. "But if you doubt me, Beccolo, seek for yourself within that
shrine; freely I grant you my share of any Larith gold."

 
          
"Generous Lythande!"
Beccolo taunted, while
Lyt-hande stood silent, angry because in this alien guise, skirts about her
body, Blue Star hidden behind paint, she knew herself at his mercy. She longed
for the comfort of her knives at her waist, the familiar breeches and
mage-robe. Even the
larith
sword would have been comforting at this
moment.

 
          
"And
you make a pretty woman indeed," Beccolo taunted. "Perhaps the gold
within the shrine is only the bodies of her priestesses; did you find, then,
that gold?"

 
          
She
turned a little, her hands fumbling swiftly within her pack. The sword was in
her hand. But she could tell by the feel that it was the wrong sword, the one
that killed only the creatures of magic, the bane-wolf or werewolf, the ghoul
and the ghost would fall before it; but against Beccolo she was helpless, and
that sword of no avail. Her hands buried in her pack, she fumbled in the folds
of the bundled-up mage-robe and the hard leather of her own breeches to find
the hilt of the sword that was effective against an enemy as unpleasantly
corporeal as Beccolo. The Blue Star between his brows mocked her with its
flare; she swept one hand over her forehead and wiped the cosmetic from her
own.

 
          
"Ah,
don't do that," Beccolo mocked.
"Shame to spoil a
pretty woman with your scrawny hawk-face.
And here you are where perhaps
I can make Lythande as much of a fool as you made me in yonder courts of the
Temple
of the Star! Suppose, now,
I shouted to all men to come and see Lythande the Magician, Lythande the
Shadow, here disguised as a woman, primed for some mischief in their shrine
—
what then, Lythande?"

           
It is only his malice. He does
not know the law Larith
. Yet if he should carry out his threat, there were
those in this town who would know
—
or
believe
—
that Lythande, a man, an
Adept of the Blue Star, had cheated her way into the shrine where no man might
set his foot. There was no safety here for Lythande either as a man or a woman;
and now she had her hand on the hilt of her right-hand blade but could not
extricate it from the tangled belongings of her pack.

 
          
It
would serve her right, she thought
,
if for this
womanish folly she was entrapped here in a duel with Beccolo cumbered with
skirts and disarmed by her own precautions. She had hidden her swords too well,
thinking she would have leisure and the cover of night to shed the disguise!

 
          
"Yet
before Lythande is Lythande again," Beccolo's hateful, mocking voice
snarled, "perhaps I should try whether or not it is not more fitting to
Lythande to put skirts about his knees . . . how good a woman do you make,
then, O fellow Pilgrim?" His hand dragged Lythande to him; his free hand
sought to ruffle the fair hair. Lythande wrenched away, snarling a gutter obscenity
of Old Gandrin, and Beccolo, snatching back a blackened hand that smoked with
fire, howled in anguish.

 
          
/
should have stood still and let him have his fun until I could get my sword
in my hand. . . .

 
          
Lightning
flared from the Blue Star, and Lythande brought her own hand up in a
warding-spell, furiously rummaging for her right-hand sword. The smell of magic
crackled in the air, but Beccolo plunged at Lythande, yelling in fury.

 
          
If
he touches me, he will know I am a woman. And if the secret of any Adept is
spoken aloud, then is his Power forfeit. He has only to say,
Lythande, you
are a woman,
and he is revenged for all time for that foolishness in the
outer court of the Blue Star.

           
"Damn you, Lythande, no one
makes a fool of Beccolo twice
—
"

 
          
."No,"
said Lythande, with calm contempt, "you do so admirably yourself."
Desperately she wrenched at the trapped sword. He yelled again, and a spell
sizzled in the air between them.

 
          
"Thief!
Hedgerow-sorcerer," Lythande shouted at
him, delaying as the sword sawed at the leather holding it in the pack,
"Defiler of virgin goats!"

 
          
Only
for a moment Beccolo paused; but she caught the flash of despair in his eyes.
Somehow, in the careless profanity of Old Gandrin, had Beccolo delivered
himself
into her hands? Had the spirit of the
larith
prompted
her to a curse Lythande had never used before and would never use again?

 
          
What,
after all, had she now to lose, without even a sword in her hand?
"Beccolo," she repeated, slowly and deliberately, "you are a
despoiler of virgin goats!"

 
          
He
stood motionless as the words echoed in the square around them. She could feel
the voiding of Power from the Blue Star. Truly she had stumbled upon his
Secret; he stood silent, unmoving, as she got the sword in her hand and ran him
through with it.

 
          
A
crowd was gathering; Lythande picked up her skirts without dignity, the sword
in her hand along with the fold of her skirt, and ran, disappearing around a
market-stall and there enfolding herself in a magical sphere of silence. The
shouts and yells of the crowd were cut off in a thick, quenched,
clogged
silence,
as the utter stillness of the Place Which Is Not enfolded her, a sphere of
nothingness, like colorless, water or dazzling fire. Lythande drew a long
breath and began to shuck her borrowed skirts. Now for the unbinding-spell that
would return these things to the stalls of their owners, somewhat the worse of
wear. As she spoke the spell, she began to chuckle at the picture of Beccolo
engaged in the Secret on which he had gambled his life
—
for the secret spoken in careless abuse, hidden out in the
open, was harmless; only when Lythande spoke it openly to his face did it
acquire the magical Power of an Adept's Secret.

 
          
But
not even in secret may I be a woman. . . .

 
          
Setting
her lips tight, she waved her hand and dispelled the sorcerous sphere. Once
again Lythande had appeared in a strange street from thin air, and that would
do her reputation no harm either, nor the reputation of the Pilgrim Adepts.

 
          
Glancing
at the sky, she noticed that the time-annihilating magical sphere had cost her
a day and more; Keth again stood at the zenith. She wondered what they had done
with Beccolo's body. She did not care. A stream of pilgrims was winding its way
upward still to the shrine of the Goddess as Larith, and Lythande stood
watching for a moment, remembering the face of the young girl and the
soft-spoken blessing of a priestess. Her hand felt empty without the
larith
sword.

 
          
Then
she turned her back on the shrine and strode toward the ferry.

 
          
"Watch
where you step, you swaggering defiler of virgin goats," a man snarled as
the Adept passed in the swirling mage-robe.

 
          
Lythande
laughed. She said, "Not I," and stepped on board the ferry, turning
her back on the shrine of women's magic.

 
 
          
The
antecedent of this story
—
though 1 did not know it
until long after it had been written and printed in
The Magazine of Fantasy and
Science Fiction
—
is the old story of the
Siren Song. I remember one story
—
probably
by the late great Theodore Sturgeon
—
in
which a mermaid appeared to men as a desirable woman, but to women as a man.
This too is the siren-song story, where to every comer the siren
—
or the
lorelei
, or the harpy
—
appears to the wanderer, as she appeared to the homeless
Ulysses, and, as in the old folksong,

 
          
"Sings,
in sad sweet undertone,
The
song of heart's
desire."

 
          
But
Lythande, who professed to have no loves and no heart's desire, would she be
vulnerable to such an apparition? I had intended this story to be wry and
ironic
—
no use appealing to the
heart of the heartless
—
and discovered it was
sentimental and bittersweet.

 
          
As
I have said before, I never know what my stories are about until after I've
written them. I often find myself toying with an idea then write it to find out
what it's about.