The Lady of Han-Gilen (4 page)

The priestess laughed and smoothed his tangled hair. He was
as dark as she, with the same striking face and the same great black eyes set
level in it. “Come and claim him, you mean to say. Is it a white war-stallion
you’re wanting, then?”

“Not for me,” he said. “For you. For the best rider in the
world.”

“Flatterer.” Still laughing, she let him pull her to the
garden’s gate.

It flew open. Mother and son halted.

A man flung himself at the priestess’ feet. In face, garb,
and bearing he was a commoner, a farmholder of Han-Gilen with the earth of his
steading on his feet.

“Lady,” he gasped. “Lady, great sickness—my woman, my
sons—all at once, out of blue heaven—”

All laughter fled from the priestess’ face. She drew taut,
as one who listens to a voice on the edge of hearing.

Her face twisted, smoothed. Its calm, where a moment before
it had been so mobile, was terrible to see.

She looked down. “Do you command me, freeman?”

The man clutched her knees. “Lady, they say you are a
healer. They say—”

She raised her hand. He stiffened. For a moment he was
different, a subtle difference, gone before it won a name.

The priestess bowed her head. “Lead me,” she said.

He leaped up. “Oh, lady! Thank all the gods I found you here
with none to keep me from you. Come now, come quickly!”

But her son held her back with all his young strength. She
turned in his grip. For a moment she was herself, brows meeting, warning.
“Mirain—”

He held her more tightly, his eyes wide and wild. “Don’t go,
Mother.”

“Lady,” the man said. “For the gods’ sake.”

She stood between them, her eyes steady upon her son. “I
must go.”

“No.” He strove to drag her back. “It’s dark. All dark.”

Gently but firmly she freed herself. “You will stay here,
Mirain. I am called; I cannot refuse. You will see me again. I promise you.”
She held out her hand to the man. “Show me where I must go.”

oOo

For a long while after she was gone, Mirain stood frozen.
Only his eyes could move, and they blazed.

But the priestess summoned her bay stallion and a mount for
the messenger, and rode from the temple. No one took undue notice of her
leaving. The lady of the temple often rode out so to work her healing about the
princedom, led or followed by a desperate wife or husband, kinsman or kinswoman,
village priest or headman. Her miracles were famous, and justly so, gifts of
the god who had taken her as his bride.

At last her son broke free from the binding. Running with
unwonted awkwardness, stumbling, seeing nothing and no one, he passed the door
of the prince’s stable. The prince himself was there, that dark man with his
bright hair, intent still on Fleetfoot’s foal. Mirain nearly fell against him;
stared at him with eyes that saw him not at all; fumbled with the latch of a
stall door.

A black muzzle thrust through the opening; a body followed
it, a wicked, dagger-horned, swift-heeled demon of a pony.

The prince braved hooves and horns to catch Mirain’s
shoulders. “Mirain!” The name took shape in more than voice. “Mirain, what
haunts you?”

Mirain stood very still. “Mother,” he said distinctly.
“Treachery. She knows it. She rides to it. They will kill her.”

Prince Orsan let him go. He mounted and clapped heels to the
sleek sides. Even as he burst into the sunlight, a red stallion thundered
after, likewise bridleless and saddleless; but his rider bore a drawn sword.

oOo

The farmer’s holding lay at a great distance from the
city; so he told the priestess, disjointedly, driving his borrowed mount with
brutal urgency. Her own stallion, better bred and more lightly ridden, kept a
steady pace up from the level land into the hills. They followed the wide North
Road; those who passed gave way swiftly before them. Some, knowing the
priestess, bowed in her wake.

The road lost itself in trees. The man slowed not at all. He
rode well and skillfully for one who could not often have spared time or coin
for the art. She let her stallion fall back a little, for the trees were thick,
raising root and branch to catch the unwary.

Her guide veered from the track up a steep narrow path
treacherous with stones. His mount slid, stumbled, recovered; the priestess
heard its laboring breath. “Wait!” she cried. “Will you slay your poor beast?”

His only answer was to lash it with the reins, sending it
plunging up the slope. There was light beyond; he vanished into it.

Just short of the summit, the priestess checked her senel.
There was fear in her eyes, here where none could see.

None but the god, and Elian dreaming. The god would not
speak. Elian could not.

Need not. All this, long ago, the priestess had foreseen.
She had chosen it. She must not turn back, now that it had come upon her. Her
lips firmed; her eyes kindled. Lightly she touched heel to the bay’s side.

The trees opened on a greensward, a stream and a pool, a
loom of stone. By the pool her guide waited. She rode toward him.

Something hissed. Her stallion reared, suddenly wild,
stretched to his full height, and toppled, convulsed on the grass. A black
arrow pierced his throat.

The priestess had sprung free and fallen, rolling. Swift
though she was, warrior-trained, her long robe hampered her; before she could
rise fully, the weight of many bodies bore her down.

After the first instinctive struggle, she lay still. Hard
hands dragged her to her feet. Gauntleted hands; masks of woodland green and
brown, with eyes glittering behind them.

Her guide had dismounted. Now that his part was ended, he
carried himself not at all like a farmholder; his lip curled as he looked at
her, and he swaggered, a broad dun-clad figure among the band of forest folk.

She met his stare and smiled faintly. His eyes held but a
moment before they slid away. “If one of your folk has need of healing,” she
said, “I will tend him freely, without betrayal.”

“Without betrayal, say you?” This was a new voice. It raised
a ripple among the reivers: a clear, cold, contemptuous voice with an accent that
could only be heard in the very highest houses of Han-Gilen.

Its owner advanced through the circle of armed men to stand
beside the pool. A body once slender had grown gaunt with time and suffering;
hair once red-gold was ashen grey, strained back from a face which even yet was
beautiful, like an image cast in bronze. The eyes in it were lovely still,
though terrible, black and burning cold.

The priestess regarded her in neither surprise nor fear. “My
lady,” she said, giving high birth its due, “you are well within the borders of
Han-Gilen. It is death for you to walk here.”

“Death?” The woman laughed with no hint of mirth. “What is
death to the dead?” She moved closer, a tall sexless figure in mottled green,
and gazed down from immeasurable heights, too high even for hatred. “Dead
indeed, dead and rotted, with a curse upon my grave; for I dared the
unthinkable. High priestess of Avaryan in Han-Gilen, face to face with a
wandering initiate from the north, I accepted her into my temple. She swore by
all the holy things, by the god’s own hand she swore that she had kept her
vows. To serve the god with all her being; to Journey as he bade her, seven
years of wandering, cleaving to his laws; to know no man.

“Aye, she served him well indeed in whatever task we set
her, even servants’ work, slaves’ work, though she boasted that she was the
daughter of a king. There were some who thought she might become a saint.

“But saints do not grow big with child. Nor do even common
priestesses, unless they hunger after death: the sun-death, chained atop the
tower of the temple, with an altar of iron beneath them and Avaryan’s crystal
above.

“I was slow to see. I was high lady of the temple, and she
did her service in the kitchens; and a priestess’ robe can hide much. But not
the belly of a woman within a Brightmoon-waning of her time, as she bends over
a washtub scouring a cauldron. And every priestess in the kitchens moving to
conceal her, conspiring against their lady, defying the law of their order.

“I dared observe it. I held the trial. No answer did it gain
me, no defense save one, that the miscreant had broken no vows. Her guilt was
as clear as her body’s shape, stripped now to its shift that strained to cover
her. I condemned her. I commanded what by law I must command. ‘I have broken no
vows,’ she said to me, unshakable.

“And who should come upon us but the Prince of Han-Gilen? He
defied me, son of my brother though he was, lay votary of the order, bound to
obedience within the walls of my temple. His men-at-arms loosed the prisoner,
and my priests stood aside with sheathed swords, for she had bewitched them
also. I cursed them all. In the law’s name I snatched a sword to do execution.
And they seized me, my own priests, and my kinsman held me to trial. I had
dared to lay hands upon the god’s chosen bride, and through her his
true-begotten son, heir of Avaryan and emperor that would be. My law had no
defense for me; the prince had what he called mercy. Forbearing to put me to
death, instead he stripped me of my torque and my office, unbound and cut away
my braid, and cast me into exile. And all the while his woman watched me with
his bastard in her belly.”

The words were like hammer blows, weighted with long years
of bitterness. The priestess bore them in silence. When the exile fell silent
at last, the younger woman spoke. “You chose your punishment. You could have
kept your office and accepted the truth; or you could have stepped aside in
honor, setting me in your place and retiring to the cloister.”

“Honor, say you?” The exile’s contempt was absolute. “You, who
would found an empire on a lie?”

“On the god’s own truth.”

The exile’s face was a mask. “You have found the truth here,
O betrayer of your vows. All Han-Gilen lies under your spell. But I have
escaped it. I have wielded my freedom in its guise of banishment, to gather
such men as will not succumb to sorcery, to restore the shattered law. It
remains. It waits to take you.”

The priestess smiled. “Not the law; the god. Can you not
hear how he calls me?”

“The god has turned his face from you.”

“No. Nor has he abandoned you, greatly though you fear it,
greatly enough to turn all against him and bow at the feet of his dark sister.
When first I came to you, when you saw me and hated me for the love you knew he
bore me, how terribly I pitied you; for you had no knowledge at all of his love
for you. Rank you had, and power, but where you looked for him you could not
find him. You despaired; yet you had but sought him where he was not. He waited
still, calling to your deaf ears, waiting for your eyes to turn to him. Even
now he cries to you. Will you not listen? Will you not see?”

There were tears in the priestess’ eyes, tears of
compassion. The exile’s hands came up to her face; she thrust them down. Her
voice lashed out. “Silence her!”

Blades flashed. The priestess smiled. If she knew pain, it
could not touch the heart of her joy.

Hooves rang on stone. A deep voice cried out: “Sanelin!” A lighter
one rose above it, close to a shriek:
“Mother!”
Black pony and red charger plunged into the glade.

The priestess lay where her captors had flung her, on her
back by the water. Bright blood stained the grass.

Men howled, trampled under sharpened hooves, cloven by the
prince’s sword. She neither heard nor saw. Above her loomed her enemy.

The exile’s hand rose high, with a dagger glittering in it;
yet even as the blade poised to fall, the woman looked up. Hooves struck at
her, both dainty and deadly; a narrow wicked head tossed, slashing sidewise
with its horns.

She writhed away, around, beneath. Her knife flashed upward
past the pony, toward its rider.

Sanelin cried out. Mirain flung up his hand. Lightnings
leaped from it.

The knife found flesh. But its force was feeble. Its wielder
cried aloud and reeled, clawing at her eyes, and fled.

The pony stood still, snorting. Mirain wavered half stunned,
his hand dangling, burning. The fire flickered in it, burning low now, a golden
ember.

Sanelin could not draw his gaze, could not speak. A massive fist
smote him to the ground.

The silence was absolute. No living enemy stood in the
glade. The man who had struck Mirain had turned and found himself alone and
undefended, with the black pony rearing over him; he bolted without a sound.

Here and there on the grass huddled shapes clad in mottled
green. A red stallion stood over one in green as dark as evening, with a
bloodied sword clutched in the lifeless hand. The senel nuzzled the bright
tumble of hair, snorting at the scent of blood upon it.

Sanelin’s legs would not yield to her will. Slowly, with
many pauses, she dragged herself toward her son. He had fallen in a heap, his
hand outflung, a long shallow cut stretching red from elbow to wrist.

The palm flamed as if it cupped molten gold. She fell beside
it and pressed her lips to it. It was searing hot, molten indeed, brand and
sigil of the god, with which he had marked his son.

And with which he had struck down the exile. Her anguish
shuddered in the earth.

oOo

Elian shuddered with it, and gasped. Wind whispered
through the grass. The red senel had dropped its head to graze; no proud
stallion horns crowned its brow, no sorely wounded prince lay at its feet.

No slain men, no boy and no pony, and no dying priestess.
Elian was alone and awake in the place where the holy one had died; where her
father had come close to death, and lived only through Mirain, who coming to
his senses had given the prince what healing the god vouchsafed, and brought
him back to the city.

That was Elian’s earliest clear memory: the prince bloodied
and unconscious on the stallion, and the boy riding behind him to steady him,
and the pony following like a hound. And bound to the pony’s back with strips
of mottled green, the body of Avaryan’s bride.