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 areyou? And he had no answer for me, for here it was the priest who was the power, not the god, poor empty stone.
I set down the copper implements before him with a slight clatter. Into the round cup on its three-legged stand I poured incense dust, and lit it by thrusting a taper into the fire already burning there in its brazier.