The Birthgrave (23 page)

“Healer! She was mixing up the herbs—the Givers of Life—I saw her.”

“And so? I told her to do it.”

“Told her—? But that was
my
work!” the girl wailed, her face blank and pale.

“Well, it's your work no longer, hussy. You can bring the food and water from here on, and no more.”

“Healer!” screamed the girl, grabbing at hand and sleeve now.

Uasti picked her off.

“If I decide otherwise, I'll tell you,” Uasti said. “Until then, you are cook-girl.”

The girl curled over on herself and began to sob.

I was very angry with Uasti, for now I saw what was in her mind—to deprive one in need, and give to one who had no wish for it. She came into the wagon, dropped her bag of potions, and sat in the wooden chair.

I sat by the flap, and said to her, “Why do that? She had served you many years, and was apprentice to your trade.”

“Why? Because she's a fool and a sniveler. Years, you say, since twelve, five years in all, and she has learned little enough. She's no instinct for it. And the Touch isn't in her fingers. I'd thought there was nothing better.”

“Until now,” I said.

Uasti moved her hands noncommittally. “It remains to be seen.”

The black cat rubbed by me on its way to take possession of her knees.

“Cat likes you,” Uasti said. “She never liked that other one.”

“Uasti,” I said, “I am not a healer.”

“Not a healer? Oh, yes. And a stone is not a stone, and the sea is made of black beer, and men run backward.”

“Uasti, I am not a healer.”

“You're a strange one,” she said. “You've more power in your eyes than in your fingers, and more power in your fingers than I in mine, and you let it lie.”

“I have no power.”

“But you've healed before. Yes, I know it. I can
smell
it on you.”

“I did not heal. It was their belief I could, not I that healed them.”

I said this before I could keep the words back, and Uasti smiled a little, glad I had committed myself. I became very angry then, and all the hurt and fear and bewilderment crowded in on me. Who knew better than I that in showing another his or her fears, one finds one's own? Yet I could not help it. It was dark in the wagon, the flaps down, only Uasti's bright eyes and the bright eyes of the cat gleaming at me, two above two.

“Uasti, healer-woman,” I said, and my voice was a pale iron shaft through that dark, “I come from earth guts, and I have lived with men in the stamp they have given me which was not of my choosing. I have been goddess and healer and bandit and warrior, and archer too, and beloved, and for all this I have suffered, and the men and women who set me in the mold of my suffering have suffered also because of me. I will not run between the shafts anymore. I must be my own and no other's. I must find my soul-kin before I corrupt myself with the black impulse which is in me. Do you understand, Uasti of the wagon people?”

The two pairs of ice-bright beads stared back, a creature without form, seeing, waiting.

“Look, Uasti,” I said, and I dragged the brazier near me, and poked it into life, then pulled the shireen away from my face.

By the flicker of the coals, I saw Uasti's old woman's face draw in on itself, the lines suddenly harder etched. The cat bristled and rose, spitting, its ears flat to its head.

“Yes, Uasti,” I said, “now you see.”

And I put on the mask again, and sat looking at her.

She did not move for a moment, then she quieted the cat, and her own face was expressionless.

“Indeed I see. More than you think, you who are of the Lost Ones.”

I cringed at that name, but she lifted her hand.

“Come here, lostling.” And I went to her, and kneeled before her, because there was nothing else I could do, while the cat jumped from her lap and ran somewhere in the wagon to shelter from me.

“Yes,” Uasti said, “I know a little. It's legend now, but legend is the smoke from the fire, and the wood that the fire consumes is the substance. When I was a little thing, many, many years ago, and they saw I had the healing touch, my village sent me to live with a wild race in the hills, and there I learned my trade. They were a strange people, wanderers, they went from place to place, but they believed they had the eye of a god, a great god, greater than any other, and, wherever they went, they carried a box of yellow metal, and in the box was a book. It was written in a strange tongue, and some of the old ones said they could read it, but I am not so sure of that. They'd chew a herb they grew in little pitchers of earth, and lie in dark places, and have dreams about the Book. But they knew the legends of the old lost race without the trances. There was an inscription on the cover of that Book. The cover was gold, and the joints were gold, and the inscription was all I ever saw. They never let a woman look inside it.” Uasti lifted aside the rugs, picked up the iron which was used to stir the brazier, and sprinkled something from an open vessel on the bare floor. With the hot metal she traced out the words:

BETHEZ TE-AM

And then she glanced at me.

“Well, lostling?”

Those words, so close to me in the green dust she had sprinkled, not spoken because of their power—how new and alien they seemed, for I sensed no evil in them, only a great sorrowing.

“Herein the truth,” I said.

“They called it the Book of the True Word,” Uasti said. “Their god had dictated it, but the legends knew better, and the healers knew better too. So I learned.”

3

I thought that I had been one with Darak, in my fashion, forgetting oneness does not come from the body alone. Now I became one with the strange old woman of the wagon people—by an almost imperceptible process that sprang from understanding.

The day after we had spoken together in the wagon, the storm lifted and the camp pressed on. It was late in the year for traveling, the snow very close, brooding behind whitish-gray skies adrift with cloud clots. A boy drove our wagon, and the little shaggy horses which pulled it. Uasti often got out to walk, and I walked with her. She was very brisk and strong, and the cold slid off her like water off a turtle's shell. I did not see the girl who had been her apprentice, except when she brought Uasti's food. Then she did not look at me, but only at Uasti, pleadingly, like a dog.

But all these things were little things beside the oneness.

In fact, she had not told me so much, but she had
known,
and that had been a wonderful release for me. The legends they had told her, the strange wild men and women of that savage tribe where she had learned her healing arts, were many-colored and many-faceted, and, as with any legend, one must read between the words, being skeptical but not too much so, sifting and rejecting and searching. There had been a race—the Lost, the Book of the tribe called them, a great race, skilled in the Power, healers and magicians of genius. But evil had possessed them and eaten them and spewed them up again in a new form. Then they ruled with hate, malice, and corruption. In the end a disease had come, nameless yet terrible, and they had died in droves, in the very acts of pleasure that had damned them. Some were buried in the magnificent mausoleums of their ancestors, others, having none left to bury them, rotted in their palaces, and became at last white bones among the white bones of their cities, and even the bones perished. And so they were no more. But the Book, or so the priests said, had persisted in its cry that the old race were not made up of evil and hatred only. Their symbol had been the phoenix, the fire-bird rising from its own ashes. There would be a second coming—and gods and goddesses would walk the earth again.

I do not know if Uasti believed me to be one of that second coming. Certainly there was little enough goddess in me. She never asked me where I came from or what I knew, and I never told her more than I had that day when I pulled the shireen from my face. Yet there was this sharing. She began to teach me her arts, very simple and humble in their way, and I found a response in me. I wanted—
needed
to know.

The wagoners were beginning to accept me. When I went among them with Uasti they scarcely noticed now, and once or twice, when I walked on my own away from the wagons, at night, when they were in the shelter of some cave or other, people would come and ask me to tell Uasti this or that. And once I found a lost girl-child in some cave alley, crying, and when I led her back to the firelight, she came very trustingly and put her hand in mine. I am not a one for children, there is not enough human woman in me for that, but a child's trust is a remarkable compliment, and it touched me.

That night I wept for Darak, silently, in the wagon, and, although I was silent, I knew Uasti heard my grief, but she did not come to question or comfort, knowing, wise one, there was nothing she could do.

The next day it was better.

Oh, yes, he will always be there in me. I have good reason to remember, but, like the old wound, it throbs only at certain seasons, and then one is well used to it.

* * *

The eighth day after I had come to them, the snow began to fall all around us, thick and white.

The pass was narrow, the crags going up on every side and away into their own gray distances. The snow would choke the way eventually, bring down boulders and avalanches of loose stuff and torn-up pines. There were also the wolves who came out at us soon as the whiteness was down. They were not very big, whitish in color, but with flaming eyes. They harried us like an army hidden in among the rocks. The children and the sick or weakly were shut firmly in the wagons, as were the stores of food. Riders went on the outside of the caravan, holding burning tar-torches with which they thrust at the wolves. But the horses did not like our new companions, and it was a weary, noisy, irritable time.

For all the caravan was officially led by the most important merchants traveling with it—Oroll, Geret, and two or three others—it lacked organization, and there were constant disputes between the “leaders.” I had been wondering how they would get across the Ring at all with the snow coming so fast, for it could only be the first snow of many. Uasti told me there was a tunnel soon, through the mountain rock itself, a sheltered black passageway hewn out long ago. She did not say the human slaves of the Old Race had made it, but I thought it was so. Now an argument broke out among the wagons as to whether we should make on toward this place or hole up in some cave until the brief thaw that generally comes after this first snowfall. Geret and another were for waiting, Oroll and the rest were for pressing on. Fairly soon the caravan had split into factions. There were fights, and bleeding noses and broken knuckles for Uasti to heal. Finally, in the refuge of a cave, the snow piled high outside, fires blazing at the cave-mouth to keep the howling wolves away, they came to Uasti, and demanded she read the auguries.

With men it is always this way, they will ignore their gods until they are in trouble or need, and then they will turn to them with sudden fervor and belief. The god of the wagoners was a small, white image, rough-hewn and only a foot or so in height. They carried it in the spice wagon and so it came out reeking of herbs, cinnamon, musk, and pepper, and was dumped by sneezing porters in the back of the cave. They called it Sibbos, and it was a man-god, and they had a special red and yellow robe that they brought out for it now, and put on it, together with necklets and rings and colored beads. It had an expressionless, unpainted face, and there was no special aura to it, for it was not worshiped often enough to have taken on any personality of its own, as do the vast statues of the temple gods, who are feared and called to every day of the year.

I had been learning Uasti's medicine for some days now; not so much the binding of wounds and setting of limbs, but those other arts which are deeper and more profound.

Now, after Geret and his men had gone, she turned to me and said, “I'm old for this work. You shall do it.”

I did not want any part of their religion, and I told her so. I had thought she understood my needs and antipathies.

“Yes,” she said, “but I understand too that in your way you must get power over others. That's your heritage, and you can't shy away from it forever. Here is power in a small way, and you must take it, and learn to control both others and yourself.”

Then she took out a black robe with long sleeves, and a black belt to pull it in at the waist, and made me put them on. They were her things, but she was a slim, small woman, and they fitted me well, too well, perhaps. I stood silent then, while she told me what I must do, a strange figure, white hands and feet and hair, black mask-face, and black body. She put the necessary things into my fingers, opened the flap, and told me to go.

I went out from among the wagons into the round belly-vault of the cave. Red firelight and smoke hung across it like shifting veils of gauze, and through the veils I saw them all, hushed and waiting, the pale, intent faces turning abruptly now to the god and his priest.

When they saw it was the tribal woman and not the healer, a little gasp and mutter went up, but they had awed themselves too much before the expedient god to make a scene now in front of him.

It seemed I had enacted this role so often, the sea of staring faces fixed on me—in the village, in the ravine camp, at Ankurum when the Sirkunix roared, and later at the Victors' feast. But this time there was a difference. In the village I had not wanted to have power over them, or thought I had not; in the hills the faces had been hostile. Now there was that look of waiting, and submission—not the frenzy of the stadium, but the quiet sleep-trance of belief. Something stirred in me at it, as I realized I had them in my palm. I stood very still in my white and black, holding the copper things in my hands, and then I began to walk between them toward the god. And I laughed at the god as I went toward him.
You
—
what are you?
And he had no answer for me, for here it was the priest who was the power, not the god, poor empty stone.