When the torch was set up on the spike of the stand, I dipped a taper in the altar brazier and set it alight.
My hands were trembling as I turned my back on them, and confronted Sibbos as if to pray. Could I do this thing? Well, too late now if I could not. I stared at the bright blue jewel on his breast until my eyes unfocused, and slowly, slowly, an avenue in my brain came open, and I walked down it. Now I seemed two people as I turned back to them. First myself, heavy as a sleeper, conscious of my body only as one is conscious in a half-dream, without any control over it at all; and the second—an entity, cold as an ice-crystal in the top of my skull, who controlled my body perfectly, as the first “I” could not.
I turned myself to face them, and, as I did so, I placed one of my hands on the hand of Uasti.
“I am guiltless of your murder, dead one,” I called out, yet not I but the other “I,” a voice that I did not feel vibrate in my throat. “If this is as I have said, let the fire not burn me.”
I heard them hold their breath, the single held breath of the crowd, all one.
Then I leaned myself forward across the torch, and the flame lapped my shoulders, breasts, and bellv. I did not feel the flame at all; even had it burned me, I should have felt nothing, but the yellow luminance slid like water on my skin, and left no mark. Cries and shouts went up from the crowd. I stood myself straight, and drew the torch off its spike in my numb hands, and stroked it up and down me. It glowed on my flesh, but without smoke. The noise had fallen off again. It was totally silent as I made the torch go back into its position on the spike, turned to the god and the blue jewel, and let go the trance that was on me. It was a strange coming-together of the two parts of me—swift and shocking in the return as the going-out had been slow and dreamlike. Sound, sight, smell, touch seemed overbearingly acute, almost agonizing, but I had no time to be discomfited. My body was whole and I had proved myself, and now came the next move.
“A trick!”
Uasti’s girl had run forward, nearer to the back of the cave where the god stood. Furiously she screamed, spitting white flecks in her terrified anger.
“Can’t you see it’s a trick! Don’t let the murderess escape her punishment!”
The vague murmurs rumbled again, but I called, “No trick at all,” and I stooped down to the green cloak, and ripped a piece out of it, stood, and dropped it on the torch. At once the material caught and flared up, turning black in a moment. The crowd pressed closer now, but their intensity was a different thing. I began to hear the words.
“She’s innocent. The spirit of Uasti protects her.”
“Wait,” I shouted, and they stopped like horses who feel the reins suddenly pulled hard in their mouths.
“All is not done. The god is angry at the death of the healer. Someone here is a murderer. If not I, then who?” It was the moment of attack and not defense, and I took a fierce joy in it, I who had been the quarry until now. “You!” I pointed at a plump woman near the front. “Was it you?” and she shrank away, pale with shock. “Or you?” and I turned on a skinny, narrow-skulled man in the center, whose mouth dropped open, showing the dismal stares of a few, coyly distributed gray teeth. “Tell your men to bring those two here,” I hissed at Geret, and in a moment the stupefied man and whimpering woman were dragged struggling to the god.
I went to the woman first, and, as I possessed her terrified eyes, I said, “Have no fear. If you are innocent, Sibbos will protect you. Touch Uasti’s hand and she will protect you too.”
The woman—calmed, sure of her innocence, and under my will now—touched the dead paw, and then meekly let me lead her to the torch.
“If she is guiltless,” I cried out, “the fire will be cool and pleasant to her as water.”
I guided her arm, so that her hand went into the flame up to the wrist, and she gasped at it, like a child who has just seen a sea, or a sunset, or a mountain for the first time—knowing, yet delighted and amazed. The voice rose up hysterically. I drew out her plump unmarked hand, and dabbed a few drops from the copper water cup across her brow. She woke dazed and smiling. The man was next, but it was the same. The crowd was in ferment now, bubbling and chattering. I stared down at them, and motioned with one hand.
“Not I, not these,” I called out. “Who, then?”
I saw that the girl who had been Uasti’s was at the very front, where she had pushed her way, yet she was moving now trying to get back. Panic was beginning to distort her face. Abruptly, she saw me turned to her, and she stopped quite still. I began to walk toward her, and another of the quietnesses dropped around us. I went very slowly, yet in a straight line, not looking to either side, only at her. The closer I got, the more she shrank away, but she could not seem to move. In any case, the crowd would not have let her.
When I was a foot or so away, I said, “You, too, must prove your innocence before Uasti and the god,”
and many willing hands pushed her forward into mine.
It was cruelly easy, she had no strength left. I did not have to do anything to her, her own guilt and the natural fire would be enough. Yet I was not prepared for what happened—a phenomenon close to the one I had conjured, yet in reverse.
I pulled her to Uasti’s corpse and said, “Touch her hand, and, if you are innocent, she will protect you, and the fire will not burn,” and then she began to struggle and weep.
“I am afraid, I am afraid.”
“Why?”
“She is dead—a dead thing! I can’t bear to touch the dead!”
At once the great mob voice rose in the hall.
“The trial! The trial! The trial!”
I wrenched the wailing girl’s right hand and forced it down onto Uasti’s. And then the thing happened.
The girl gave a terrible shriek, animal, mindless, which cut the chant like a sword. She flung backward on her heels and fell down before the wooden chair, and her right palm was turned upwards so all could see the blackened flesh, seared to the bone.
Now the noise came loud and total, the triumph and fury and hate. Before any could stop them—and who indeed tried?—the women had the body of the girl, and had borne it away to savage it like wolves, as they would have savaged me. Yet the girl was dead, had died the moment she touched Uasti’s hand.
Sick at last, I picked up the green robe and drew it on. What power the girl had possessed after all, inside herself, and had never found the key to it, only the razor edge of it which destroyed her.
5
There was to be no thaw that winter. Uasti’s good sense, if not the auguries, had been true.
The line of wagons, guarded by the red moving hedge of the torches, toiled upward over narrow Ring Pass, to the accompaniment of the howling blizzard winds of the east, and their whirling white frenzy of new snow. At least we were free of the wolves now, for they do not like the east winds, though they have their voice.
I rode in Uasti’s wagon, among her things, which I knew very well at last, and considered mine. The boy drove the shaggy horses for me, as for her, and a different girl, quiet as a mouse, brought me the food I asked for, and came with me to carry my healer’s stuff when I went among the sick. There was not much they needed. They were, on the whole, a healthy crew. One broken limb I set, and took away the pain; a few fevers that were over and done in a day or so; a birth, easy and uncomplicated, with a mother who knew very well what she was at. That time, it was the healer who learned, but the knowledge might well prove useful later. And they called me Uasti.