The Tombs of Atuan (10 page)

He might have gone miles by now, and yet not be forty feet from the door
where he had entered.

She went to the Hall of the Throne, and to the Twin Gods’ temple,
and to the cellar under the kitchens, and, choosing a moment when she was alone, looked
through each of those spy holes down into the cold, thick dark. When night came,
freezing and blazing with stars, she went to certain places on the Hill and raised up
certain stones, cleared away the earth, peered down again, and saw the starless darkness
underground.

He was there. He must be there. Yet he had escaped her. He would die of
thirst before she found him. She would have to send Manan into the maze to find him,
once she was sure he was dead. That was unbearable to think of. As she knelt in the
starlight on the bitter ground of the Hill, tears of rage rose in her eyes.

She went to the path that led back down the slope to the temple of the
Godking. The columns with their carved capitals shone
white with
hoarfrost in the starlight, like pillars of bone. She knocked at the rear door, and
Kossil let her in.

“What brings my mistress?” said the stout woman, cold and
watchful.

“Priestess, there is a man within the Labyrinth.”

Kossil was taken off guard; for once something had occurred that she did
not expect. She stood and stared. Her eyes seemed to swell a little. It flitted across
Arha’s mind that Kossil looked very like Penthe imitating Kossil, and a wild laugh
rose up in her, was repressed, and died away.

“A man? In the Labyrinth?”

“A man, a stranger.” Then as Kossil continued to look at her
with disbelief, she added, “I know a man by sight, though I have seen
few.”

Kossil disdained her irony. “How came a man there?”

“By witchcraft, I think. His skin is dark, perhaps he is from the
Inner Lands. He came to rob the Tombs. I found him first in the Undertomb, beneath the
very Stones. He ran to the entrance of the Labyrinth when he became aware of me, as if
he knew where he went. I locked the iron door behind him. He made spells, but that did
not open the door. In the morning he went on into the maze. I cannot find him
now.”

“Has he a light?”

“Yes.”

“Water?”

“A little flask, not full.”

“His candle will be burned down already.” Kossil pondered.
“Four or five days. Maybe six. Then you can send my wardens down to drag the body
out. The blood should be fed to the Throne and the—”

“No,” Arha said with sudden, shrill fierceness. “I wish
to find him alive.”

The priestess looked down at the girl from her heavy height.
“Why?”

“To make—to make his dying longer. He has committed sacrilege
against the Nameless Ones. He has defiled the Undertomb with light. He came to rob the
Tombs of their treasures. He must be punished with worse than lying down in a tunnel
alone and dying.”

“Yes,” Kossil said, as if deliberating. “But how will
you catch him, mistress? That is chancy. There is no chance about the other. Is there
not a room full of bones, somewhere in the Labyrinth, bones of men who entered it and
did not leave it? . . . Let the Dark Ones punish him in their own
way, in their own ways, the black ways of the Labyrinth. It is a cruel death,
thirst.”

“I know,” the girl said. She turned and went out into the
night, pulling her hood up over her head against the hissing, icy wind. Did she not
know?

It had been childish of her, and stupid, to come to Kossil. She would get
no help there. Kossil herself knew nothing, all she knew
was cold
waiting and death at the end of it. She did not understand. She did not see that the man
must be found. It must not be the same as with those others. She could not bear that
again. Since there must be death let it be swift, in daylight. Surely it would be more
fitting that this thief, the first man in centuries brave enough to try to rob the
Tombs, should die by sword’s edge. He did not even have an immortal soul to be
reborn. His ghost would go whining through the corridors. He could not be let die of
thirst there alone in the dark.

Arha slept very little that night. The next day was filled with rites and
duties. She spent the night going, silent and without lantern, from one spy hole to
another in all the dark buildings of the Place, and on the windswept hill. She went to
the Small House to bed at last, two or three hours before dawn, but still she could not
rest. On the third day, late in the afternoon, she walked out alone onto the desert,
toward the river that now lay low in the winter drought, with ice among the reeds. A
memory had come to her that once, in the autumn, she had gone very far in the Labyrinth,
past the Six-Cross, and all along one long curving corridor she had heard behind the
stones the sound of running water. Might not a man athirst, if he came that way, stay
there? There were spy holes even out here; she had to search for them, but Thar had
shown her each one, last year, and she refound them without much trouble. Her recall of
place and shape was like that of a blind person: she seemed to feel her way to each
hidden spot, rather than to look
for it. At the second, the farthest
of all from the Tombs, when she pulled up her hood to cut out light, and put her eye to
the hole cut in a flat pan of rock, she saw below her the dim glimmer of the wizardly
light.

He was there, half out of sight. The spy hole looked down at the very end
of the blind alley. She could see only his back, and bent neck, and right arm. He sat
near the corner of the walls, and was picking at the stones with his knife, a short
dagger of steel with a jeweled grip. The blade of it was broken short. The broken point
lay directly under the spy hole. He had snapped it trying to pry apart the stones, to
get at the water he could hear running, clear and murmurous in that dead stillness under
earth, on the other side of the impenetrable wall.

His movements were listless. He was very different, after these three
nights and days, from the figure that had stood lithe and calm before the iron door and
laughed at his own defeat. He was still obstinate, but the power was gone out of him. He
had no spell to stir those stones aside, but must use his useless knife. Even his
sorcerer’s light was wan and dim. As Arha watched, the light flickered; the
man’s head jerked and he dropped the dagger. Then doggedly he picked it up and
tried to force the broken blade between the stones.

Lying among ice-bound reeds on the riverbank, unconscious of where she was
or what she was doing, Arha put her mouth to the cold mouth of rock, and cupped her
hands around to hold
the sound in. “Wizard!” she said,
and her voice slipping down the stone throat whispered coldly in the tunnel
underground.

The man started and scrambled to his feet, so going out of the circle of
her vision when she looked for him. She put her mouth to the spy hole again and said,
“Go back along the river wall to the second turn. The first turn right, miss one,
then right again. At the Six Ways, right again. Then left, and right, and left, and
right. Stay there in the Painted Room.”

As she moved to look again, she must have let a shaft of daylight shoot
through the spy hole into the tunnel for a moment, for when she looked he was back in
the circle of her vision and staring upward at the opening. His face, which she now saw
to be scarred in some way, was strained and eager. The lips were parched and black, the
eyes bright. He raised his staff, bringing the light closer and closer to her eyes.
Frightened, she drew back, stopped the spy hole with its rock lid and litter of covering
stones, rose, and went back swiftly to the Place. She found her hands were shaky, and
sometimes a giddiness swept over her as she walked. She did not know what to do.

If he followed the directions she had given him, he would come back in the
direction of the iron door, to the room of pictures. There was nothing there, no reason
for him to go there. There was a spy hole in the ceiling of the Painted Room, a good
one, in the treasury of the Twin Gods’ temple; perhaps that was why she had
thought of it. She did not know. Why had she spoken to him?

She could let a little water for him down one of the
spyholes, and then call him to that place. That would keep him alive longer. As long as
she pleased, indeed. If she put down water and a little food now and then, he would go
on and on, days, months, wandering in the Labyrinth; and she could watch him through the
spy holes, and tell him where water was to be found, and sometimes tell him falsely so
he would go in vain, but he would always have to go. That would teach him to mock the
Nameless Ones, to swagger his foolish manhood in the burial places of the Immortal
Dead!

But so long as he was there, she would never be able to enter the
Labyrinth herself. Why not? she asked herself, and replied—Because he might escape
by the iron door, which I must leave open behind me. . . . But he
could escape no farther than the Undertomb. The truth was that she was afraid to face
him. She was afraid of his power, the arts he had used to enter the Undertomb, the
sorcery that kept that light burning. And yet, was that so much to be feared? The powers
that ruled in the dark places were on her side, not his. Plainly he could not do much,
there in the realm of the Nameless Ones. He had not opened the iron door; he had not
summoned magic food, nor brought water through the wall, nor conjured up some demon
monster to break down the walls, all of which she had feared he might be able to do. He
had not even found his way in three days’ wandering to the door of the Great
Treasury, which surely he had sought. Arha herself had never yet pursued Thar’s
directions to that room, putting off and putting
off the journey out
of a certain awe, a reluctance, a sense that the time had not yet come.

Now she thought, why should he not go that journey for her? He could look
all he liked at the treasures of the Tombs. Much good they would do him! She could jeer
at him, and tell him to eat the gold, and drink the diamonds.

With the nervous, feverish hastiness that had possessed her all these
three days, she ran to the Twin Gods’ temple, unlocked its little vaulted
treasury, and uncovered the well-hidden spy hole in the floor.

The Painted Room was below, but pitch dark. The way the man must follow in
the maze was much more roundabout, miles longer perhaps; she had forgotten that. And no
doubt he was weakened and not going fast. Perhaps he would forget her directions and
take the wrong turning. Few people could remember directions from one hearing of them,
as she could. Perhaps he did not even understand the tongue she spoke. If so, let him
wander till he fell down and died in the dark, the fool, the foreigner, the unbeliever.
Let his ghost whine down the stone roads of the Tombs of Atuan until the darkness ate
even it. . . .

Next morning very early, after a night of little sleep and evil dreams,
she returned to the spy hole in the little temple. She looked down and saw nothing:
blackness. She lowered a candle burning in a little tin lantern on a chain. He was
there, in the Painted Room. She saw, past the candle’s glare, his legs and one
limp hand. She spoke into the spy hole, which was a large one, the
size of a whole floor tile: “Wizard!”

No movement. Was he dead? Was that all the strength he had in him? She
sneered; her heart pounded. “Wizard!” she cried, her voice ringing in the
hollow room beneath. He stirred, and slowly sat up, and looked around bewildered. After
a while he looked up, blinking at the tiny lantern that swung from his ceiling. His face
was terrible to see, swollen, dark as a mummy’s face.

He put his hand out to his staff that lay on the floor beside him, but no
light flowered on the wood. There was no power left in him.

“Do you want to see the treasure of the Tombs of Atuan,
wizard?”

He looked up wearily, squinting at the light of her lantern, which was all
he could see. After a while, with a wince that might have begun as a smile, he nodded
once.

“Go out of this room to the left. Take the first corridor to the
left. . . . ” She rattled off the long series of directions without
pause, and at the end said, “There you will find the treasure which you came for.
And there, maybe, you’ll find water. Which would you rather have now,
wizard?”

He got to his feet, leaning on his staff. Looking up with eyes that could
not see her, he tried to say something, but there was no voice in his dry throat. He
shrugged a little, and left the Painted Room.

She would not give him any water. He would never find the
way to the treasure room, anyway. The instructions were too long for him to
remember; and there was the Pit, if he got that far. He was in the dark, now. He would
lose his way, and would fall down at last and die somewhere in the narrow, hollow, dry
halls. And Manan would find him and drag him out. And that was the end. Arha clutched
the lip of the spy hole with her hands, and rocked her crouching body back and forth,
back and forth, biting her lip as if to bear some dreadful pain. She would not give him
any water. She would not give him any water. She would give him death, death, death,
death, death.

I
N THAT GREY HOUR OF
her life, Kossil
came to her, entering the treasury room with heavy step, bulky in black winter
robes.

“Is the man dead yet?”

Arha raised her head. There were no tears in her eyes, nothing to
hide.

“I think so,” she said, getting up and dusting her skirts.
“His light has gone out.”

“He may be tricking. The soulless ones are very cunning.”

“I shall wait a day to be sure.”

“Yes, or two days. Then Duby can go down and bring it out. He is
stronger than old Manan.”

“But Manan is in the service of the Nameless Ones, and Duby is not.
There are places within the Labyrinth where Duby should not go, and the thief is in one
of these.”

“Why, then it is defiled
already—”