“First,” he said, “I’d like to see my sister, the Princess Val Nardia.” He paused and said, without any expression, “Why did you tell Suthamun she was dead? To protect her?”
“She is dead, my lord.”
“Oh no. Dead women don’t bear.”
“I’m sorry to prolong your distress, my lord Prince—”
“Don’t worry about my distress. Worry about whether or not I decide to put your bloody temple to the torch.”
“No,” she said softly, “you won’t do that. You have built your reputation high in Karmiss. Such an unpopular deed would destroy all you had worked for.”
“All right. Just you, then. An official burning. Premature Lowland burial rites. When your unholy sorcery is exposed.”
“The Lord Kesarh doesn’t believe in sorcery.”
“That’s true. But you could try to convince me.”
“Then follow.”
So he let himself be led again. Yet when they got there, a curtain of figured gauze stretched midway across the room.
“No farther, my lord.”
“What’s to stop me, aside from the drapery?”
“Little. But you would kill your child.”
“Assuming I accept there is a child.”
“Assuming you accept there may be a child.”
It was possible to see through the gauze to a shadowed bed. What lay there was hidden. Incense braziers burned about the bed, as they had burned in the chambers outside. Priests had let them in, priestesses passed quietly up and down between the smokes and the flimsy screens of veiling. It had been exotic but insignificant. None of Rem’s deep-seated, passionless awe had communicated.
“On a concealed bed,” said Kesarh, “there could be anything. A peasant girl, perhaps, near term, brought on by your drugs.”
Eraz raised her left hand, and the heavy drapes about the bed started suddenly to furl upwards. A showy bit of conjuring, obviously, some lever in the floor, or unseen accomplices.
The curtaining, then its shadow, left the bed.
Kesarh said nothing. For a long time he merely stood, gazing at the figure of his sister as she lay in her black robe, her scarlet hair. Her belly rose, great with its prisoner, her hands like white flowers spilled either side, and, at the robe’s black edge, the upturned stars of her feet.
Eraz had laid her fingers lightly on his arm. He became aware he had moved abruptly forward. “Not yet, my lord.”
“What are you doing?” he said. The words, unpremeditated, unclever, hung in the nothingness.
“Magic, if you wish. The will of the goddess.”
“Damn your goddess. She’s dead—you say she’s dead?”
“She is dead. It is the child which lives, and with the turn of the tide, the breaking of the dawn, the child will be brought forth.”
“Why?”
“Because Anackire wills it.”
“Why Val Nardia’s child? Mine?” He heard his own voice. It made no sense. He asked questions which did not matter to him. There were other things, but he did not know them to ask.
“Children of one womb and one birth,” she said. “A double being reunited, creating a third. A gateway. In spirit, it is not actually your child, lord Prince. It is another child, older. But still a child of a double being, two who are one. One that is two. I can’t convince you, my lord. Let someone take you to the prepared room. Rest there.”
“Here,” he said. “I’ll stay here. Have them bring a couch, some food. Here. I shan’t leave this place until you work your magic.”
“You’re tired. It shall be done as you want.”
He caught her wrist. The grip must have hurt her, it was meant to. Through the mist of the temporary snow-blindness, her eyes shone like distant flames.
“Whatever you owe your goddess, try to recall who I am.”
But she did not reply, and somehow she slipped from him and was gone. She had vanished before, the blown-out candle—How ridiculous it was. All of it unreal. Even alone, seeing Val Nardia before him, he could not now break through the flimsy gauze.
They brought seating, food and drink. He had left his men at the village. He required the priests to taste the food for him, and the wine. It was a pedantic insurance, he did not really suppose it necessary.
He took the refreshment sparingly, not meaning to fall asleep. And gradually his trained body, like an obedient dog, responded to his demands. Wide awake, he sat and watched Val Nardia through the blurring of his sight and the curtain.
At midnight, so he judged it, hooded black-robes began to file into the chamber. There they perched against the walls, motionless, like comatose birds of prey. Then the women came. They passed across the curtain and hid everything from him.
Kesarh rose, but they made way for him at once. He went back and stood by the gauze.
The priestesses entered, and between them another woman not of the temple, presumably from the village near the landing, or some other habitation on the island. She was a Vis, sheer Vis from the look of her. At the curtain she halted, to leave her shoes lying on the ground, and to throw off her dress before them all. Under it she was naked, a matron in her late middle years, of no attractions, but strongly made. The curtain parted. He could not quite distinguish the seam, but the woman stepped through. No others. Only she. And only her flesh, no other thing, to pollute or disrupt the vacuum of the spell.
Chanting started now, all round him. It irritated Kesarh. Its insistence on some word or group of words, over and over.
The light was going down. Everything was murky.
The woman had approached his sister. It occurred to him what she must be: a midwife for the dead.
He stood at the curtain and watched as nothing at all happened.
After maybe an hour of watching this, he went to the table and took more wine, to keep himself on his feet. When the monstrous lightning flash happened he wanted to witness it. To know when the trap-door allowed them to send through the alien child, soon to be presented to him, from between his sister’s dead legs, as his own miraculous offspring.
The prelude to the light woke one of Kesarh’s twelve men, and vacating the chilly village bivouac, he went to urinate.
Beyond a walled yard, the slope ran into space. Below, the sea smoldered on the beach of stones. The soldier, eased, but cursing with the cold, was yet arrested by some quality either of strangeness or unrecognized beauty in the dawn.
He walked to the low wall, and looked out along the straits into the east.
Clouds hung like a puff of icy breath at the horizon, just turning the shade of milky amber. Through this amber a slip of palest gold now pushed its way.
Emanations of the cloud had muted the disc of the sun. The man could look directly at it as it rose, round and luminous and curious, like some new planet born from the world. Indeed, this was what the sunrise resembled, the birth of a child, the round head emerging from a womb of cloud.
The man did not know why they had been dragged to Ankabek. Some duty, they had heard, to the Prince’s sister’s tomb—that surely could have waited till the thaw.
Yet the dawn held him there, in the snow-locked silence, feeling himself the sole human thing awake on the earth that saw the coming of the sun.
The chanting had stopped. Something had happened, but he was not sure. Had he slept after all on his feet, and missed it?
Then he saw the village woman bending forward. The room seemed to shake with a kind of noiseless thunder he did not know was Power.