Daughter of Lir (39 page)

“We do learn here, how to fascinate women,” the king said.
He sounded almost smug.

“If your son learned it well,” Minas said, “he’ll be as safe
as a man can be in this world.”

The king seemed, if not satisfied, then willing to let it
go. He rose. “Come,” he said. “Take the daymeal with me.”

“As a guest?”

“You are our guest,” the king said.

An odd sort of guesting, Minas thought: bought and paid for,
and no choice in it. But it was preferable, surely, to the lot of a slave.

Rhian was offered a bed in the king’s house, but some spirit
in her sent her to the stable instead, to the mare’s stall. It was bedded deep
with sweet straw, and there was water, and a servant brought food for her to
eat. In the morning she was offered a bath and fresh clothing, all that befit a
guest. But all night long she had the mare’s warm familiar presence.

She had slept in cities. World’s End and Larchwood had been
pleasant enough, and Britta and the Mother had welcomed her with honest warmth.

In this city she had been born. Here were her blood kin. Yet
she felt no warmth. Men had greeted her, but her father, her brothers had not
known her. She had seen no women who were not either artisans or servants.
There was nothing here that spoke of honest welcome.

She went out in the morning after a restless night. The mare
did not see fit to follow. There was grass here, and leisure. She meant to
pursue both.

Therefore Rhian was alone, walking out of the king’s house,
past guards who bowed but made no move to stop her. The city was awake. Bread
was baking, potters’ wheels turning. She saw a weaver at the loom and a
goldsmith at the forge. Children tumbled and played in the street.

The temple was as silent as it had been the day before. She
hesitated in front of it. Her heart was beating hard enough to deafen her. She
would faint, she thought rather distantly.

This was the greatest of all temples, sacred to the Lady of
the Birds. It was wider than the king’s house, and higher. No one knew how many
priestesses were in it. Many: that much was certain. They were all brought
here, schooled here, then chosen for temples in every city; but the best of all
staved in Lir.

Not one of them had come out to see the chariot or its
charioteer, or to look on the mare’s servant. The gates were shut. Rhian would
have thought them dead, as the Mother was, save that she heard, dim and muffled
by walls, the soft high sweetness of women’s voices. They were chanting the
morning hymn.

After a long moment, she turned away from the locked gate.
The Mother’s house stood dark and silent. It was truly empty, truly deserted.

Its door gave to the touch of her hand. She recoiled,
startled. She had not meant to go in, not till she did it.

The court was dusty and unswept. Banks of flowers along the
wall had overgrown their ornamented pots and begun to die. The trees that
guarded the inner gate had let fall their leaves.

It would have been beautiful when the Mother was living in
it, a place of warm golden stone and rich greenery, full of the singing of
birds. Their nests clung to branches of the trees and to curves of carving
along the roofbeams. But they were all empty now. Nothing stirred in this place
but the wind swirling a handful of wan leaves about her feet.

The wind had nothing to say, or nothing it was willing to
let her hear. She walked through the linked chain of round houses that
surrounded the great house like a necklace around the neck of a Mother. All of
them were empty. She could see where the potters had been, the weavers, the
cooks and bakers, the woodworkers, the minders of children. All gone now,
vanished into the city, she supposed, or sent back to their towns and villages.

The center of them all was a hall like the king’s, but
wider, higher, airier. Its walls were carved and painted so that it seemed a
forest of trees and flowers, full of beasts and birds. The hearth was dark and
cold. The carved chair beside it, the Mother’s chair, had been a nest for mice:
its cushion was sprung, the soft goosefeathers scattered on the floor.

Rhian felt nothing as she stood there, except a kind of distant
sadness. She was not meant to sit in this chair. Her place was on the mare’s
back. Home was the wind and the sky and the freedom of the earth. This city,
these people, were not kin in the spirit, whatever their blood made them.

“I am more kin to the wild horsemen than to these my own
people,” she said. She spoke softly, but her voice echoed in the hall.

She turned away from it. Now, she thought, she would go
where she should have gone at first.

o0o

This gate was shut and barred. Rhian went over it. If there
were powers on it, she never felt them.

She came down a hill of grass divided into stone paths. They
looked like the spokes of a chariot-wheel, leading to the temple at the hub—strangely
bitter to see it so, like the image of the thing that would destroy it. Houses
lay in circles around it, many houses, and rich. But the temple was small in
the midst of them, and low, and very, very old.

She saw priestesses here and there within the walls. They
were dressed for the most part as she was dressed, in trousers with or without
tunic. Few wore the robes she had thought all priestesses must wear, and none
proclaimed her beauty in the skirt of scarlet cords in which they celebrated
their great rites. And none was masked.

They were women like any others—like Rhian as she began to
move along the path. She attracted no notice. If they had been guarding against
her, they had failed.

She approached the temple slowly. Its gate was open—here,
there seemed to be no need to protect it. It was not as large as the temple in
Larchwood. It was dark and low and redolent of age.

Here was power. Here was the Goddess’ oldest place of
worship. Here women had come since the dawn of time. Here Mothers had ruled the
rite, here they had died. And here they had been born, in a dark and ancient
room lit only by lamps, so thick with holiness that surely it had suffocated no
few of them.

Rhian had been born in that room. She stood in the outer
room of the temple, before the most ancient of all images of the Goddess, lit
by the fire that, she had been taught, had been kindled in the first morning of
the world. She felt the spirits all about her, old priestesses, old Mothers,
her ancestors and her kin.

Home, this was not; no more than the Mother’s house was. But
it was hers in ways that she could hardly begin to understand. Her blood, her
bone, were bound up in this place.

“So,” said a clear and bitter voice behind her. “You come at
last where you should never have been.”

She did not turn to face the priestess who had refused the
Goddess’ choosing. “I come where the Goddess leads me,” she said.

“You were not led here.”

“Would you know?”

She heard the soft tread of feet on the earth of the floor.
Her shoulders tightened. If the priestess meant to kill her, it would happen
now. She would not stop it. There was a wildness in her, a kind of madness.

But she was still alive when the squat sturdy figure halted
beside her. The priestess carried no weapon, unless she reckoned that her eyes
would suffice.

Rhian had never been hated. Long Ford had been stifling to
her spirit, but it had been a gentle place. Even on the steppe, among the lords
of slaughter, she had been made welcome.

This was hatred, pure and unalloyed. She met it with calm
she had to fight for. “Has it ever struck you,” she asked, “that by opposing
the Goddess’ will, you may be bringing on the thing you fear? That because you
cast me out, you made the rest inevitable?”

“No,” said the priestess. “Not ever.”

“This is no place for lies,” Rhian said.

The priestess’ breath hissed. “How dare you?”

“You know how I dare,” said Rhian. “Look about you. Think!
Because of you, there is no Mother in Lir. The temple is shut and barred. Only
the king is left to rule. When the tribes come, this city will fall, not
because its walls were weak or its defenses feeble, but because there is no one
to lead its people.”

“The king rules well,” the priestess said. “We maintain the
Goddess’ rites as we have always done.”

“But there is no one in the Mother’s house,” Rhian said.
“There is no heart in Lir.”

“This is the heart of Lir,” the priestess declared. She
struck the earth with her foot. “Here, in this place. This is the center.”

“You are as blind as you ever were,” Rhian said. “You were
born blind. But when you die, your eyes will open. You will see.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“I am telling the truth,” said Rhian.

“You should not have come here,” the priestess said.

That was a threat. Rhian turned on her. She recoiled slightly.
Rhian had no time to indulge in satisfaction. “Listen,” she said. “You listen
to me. Hate me all you like. Loathe me till your heart turns black with it. But
you will defend this city. You will help the king. You will do whatever is
needed to protect the charge that has been given you.”

“That is not yours to ordain,” said the priestess.

Rhian began to understand hate. It was a great deal like
rage, and a great deal like frustration. “You will do it,” she said. “For Lir’s
sake, you will.”

“Not for you. Not ever for you.”

“Blind,” Rhian muttered.

“Perhaps I can see.”

Rhian turned to face a woman she did not know. It was a
woman of no age in particular, as this first priestess was, but Rhian thought
she might be older. Her eyes were clouded with the veil that sometimes fell
with age, and yet they saw farther than most eyes that Rhian had known. It was
her spirit: it saw clearer, the darker the light of mortal day became.

“Lady,” Rhian said in deep respect.

The second priestess inclined her head. “Lady,” she
responded. “I will not say you are welcome here, but I greet you in the
Goddess’ name.”

“I care little for courtesies,” said Rhian. “But I will not
see this country fall for a simple lack of good sense.”

This second priestess was not lost in hate or fear: she
laughed at that, and said, “There is a little sense among us, though you might
not believe it.”

“Open the temple, then,” Rhian said. “Summon the king and
his counselors. Bring me in front of them, and I will tell you everything I
learned on the sea of grass.”

That sobered the priestess. “Have you spoken with the king?”

“No,” said Rhian.

“Ah,” the priestess said. Then: “I can summon the
priestesses. But the king—I doubt he would come at our command.”

“Ah,” said Rhian in much the same tone as the priestess had,
with much the same understanding. “Very well. We meet in the Mother’s house,
tomorrow morning. I will see that the king is there. Will you do the same for
the ladies of the temple?”

“I will try,” the priestess said.

o0o

“I do not go at their bidding,” the king said.

She had found him in a field outside the city, shooting at
targets with a bow of remarkable length and heft. It was a bow only a strong
man might bend, a man who took great pride in his strength. It made her think,
somehow, of the warriors of the steppe.

His greeting was courteous, even warm. But when she told him
of her errand, his deep blue eyes went cold. The men about him had drawn back
as if in anticipation of trouble, but he did not shout or strike. “They do not
rule me,” he said.

“They are the Goddess’ servants,” said Rhian.

He was trying, she could see, to remain calm; to remember
that she was an outsider, and very likely an innocent. Which she was, but not
to the point of idiocy. He said, “I am not their servant.”

“Tell me, then,” she said. “What they did.”

His companions glanced at one another. Innocence, she
thought, had its advantages. As did the mare, who had appeared, quite casually,
just behind her.

The king was master of his temper. He answered levelly,
brief but clear enough. “They attempted to make a Mother of one who was never
blessed with the right to that office.”

“It seems they failed,” she observed.

“She died,” he said. “In her sleep. Before she could be
consecrated.”

“Was she helped into the Goddess’ arms?”

“Not by me,” he said, “or by anyone under my orders.”

“There is still no Mother in Lir,” said Rhian, “so it seems
that your will and the Goddess’ were the same. Why are you still at war with
the priestesses?”

“Because once they failed with their false Mother, they
formed a council. That council attempted to impose its will on me.”

“You are a man,” she said. “They are women and priestesses.”

“Surely,” said the king. “They bade me abandon my plans for
the defense of this country, call back the caravan, and above all, permit no
chariots to cross the river, and no charioteers, either. If I had done as they
bade, you would still be on the steppe, and there would be no prince of
chariots teaching our people the secrets of his craft.”

“What would they have had you do?” Rhian inquired.

“Nothing,” he said. “Build walls. Train soldiers. Both of
which I was doing already. And pray—that, they urged me to do in all zeal and
piety.”

“Every breath we draw is a prayer,” Rhian said. Dura her
aunt had loved that saying, and found frequent occasion to recall it.

“Indeed,” said the king. “I will not be ruled by these
priestesses.”

“Will you come for me, then?” Rhian asked. “In the Goddess’
name?”

She held her breath. He took his time in replying. He was a
proud man, she could see, and well aware of his rank and position. And yet he
was also a man of sense, or so she had always heard.

“For you I will come,” he said. “But only for you, and for
the Goddess you serve.”