Inside the narrow door fires were burning in stone rings or in iron braziers, and yellow lamps swung overhead. A big carcass was turning on a rough spit, crackling and stinking. The villagers were crowded close as if they liked this nearness to one another. Darak was not there.
As I went in, the accustomed first silence slipped over them. They slid into the grooves of it with stealthy ease. I walked up the center aisle, between the fires and cook-pots. Every bit of food that I passed made me sick, but I found a caldron bubbling in a corner, and the smell of this did not repulse me so much.
“What is this?” I asked the girl bending over it, poised now, her mouth ajar at the sight of me.
“Broth,” she stammered, “vegetables—”
“Will you give me some?”
She jumped around, beckoned, and a child came running up with a ladle and wooden bowl. Watched by the countless fixed eyes of the people in the shelter, and the swaying gold eyes of the lamps and candles, the girl began to fill the bowl with the ladle, once, twice—
“Enough,” I said. I took it, and thanked her, and at that moment a big hand knocked the bowl from my grasp, and the girl shrieked.
“Did Darak not tell you to give no food to the witch, slut?” a voice growled, guttural and menacing.
The girl took a step back. But the bandit’s interest was no longer centered on her.
“So, the immortal goddess, who sleeps for centuries under the mountain, still needs to fill her belly, eh?
Darak told us you’d come here, and he said, when you came, to take you to him.”
I looked at the bandit through the eye-holes of the mask.
A blank unimpressionable face. He knew their legend even, but had not been reared on it, as Darak had.
I had no chance with this one.
I said: “If Darak Gold-Fisher has need of the help of the goddess, he has only to ask. I will come with you.”
The bandit grunted and swung out, leaving me to follow.
“Forgive us,” the girl whispered.
I touched her forehead with my finger, gently, as if in blessing, feeling nothing, while her face flooded with color and gratitude. Then I followed my captor.
He took me along the dark close alleys, telling me which path to follow now, and walking behind me.
Here most of the buildings were flat. We passed a marketplace with broken sheep pens, and a burned tree like a huge stick of charcoal at the center. I began to hear music then, savage, bright music, instinctively tuneful and rhythmic, but with no pattern beyond an underlying beat of drums. There was a slope where a large house had stood, facing out over the lake, toward the mountain. Only one court remained, and here, in the hot early darkness, Darak’s people were eating around their own fires, playing this hill music, chipping crudities into the stone walls.
The bandit pushed me through a low arch. Paving lay under my bare feet, still warm. Bones and apple cores were scattered about, with a dog or two nosing around them hopefully. A girl with ink hair was dancing, stamping her feet and turning in endless circles, the golden bracelets on her arms like the fire-rings of some blazing planet.
At the far end, seated on a striped rug, like the hill-king he was, Darak looked up. A few men sat around him, and there was a girl—suitably placed far down the low table. I recognized her, the other who had come from the hill with him, in black and yellow silk.
The bandit began to prod and push me with fervor now. We arrived at the table—an intriguing item, over-carved from some light wood, certainly stolen, obviously kept as a symbol of Darak’s wealth, power, and good taste.
Darak smiled courteously.
“The goddess finally feels hungry,” he remarked. “Sit here, then, and eat.”
“I cannot eat in the sight of others,” I said.
“Of course, your holy mask. Then take it off.”
“No one must see my face. Do you not recall that, Darak?”
My voice, so cold and clear was the last of my strength. I was weakening now, frightened and angry and bewildered. The stench of food and drink came all around me, and there seemed no escape.
“We’re not afraid, goddess.” He stopped looking at me to peel a fruit. For all his lounging here, he was not a man who liked to be still. I wished him dead, but not hard enough. “Come, goddess. We can tell what you’ve got to hide. You’re albino—white hair, white face. Eyes too—although the mask holes throw a good shadow over them there’s no color. So. No more pretense. Sit and eat.”
He gave a little nod of his head; I almost did not see. But the big brute behind me giggled like a child, and the finger tips brushed my hair, coming for the hooks of the mask.
No, by all of my lost soul. They should not have my shame as a present in their stinking den.
I ducked under his hand, spinning around. My foot, the long toes clenched inward like a fist, kicked up and jabbed home in his groin. No compunction. I had seen what these things, half animal, used their genitals for, beyond the true purpose, and I was arrogant still with a raw and uncompassionate arrogance. He yelped and doubled and fell over, and I knew I had done enough to him.
I turned back to Darak, and he looked surprised.
“Well,” he said, and stopped.
I grasped the second before it was too late, to throw him now while he was unbalanced in front of his horde.
“You are the leader of these people,” I said to him, “and you have a right as such. I will show you what no other man may look on. Privately. Then you can judge for yourself.”
I felt sick when I had said it, sick and sad, and ashamed already. But I knew what must be done.
After a moment he grinned.
“An honor, goddess, to be shown privately what no other may look on.”
Some of them guffawed, and made their various absurd children’s jokes about the sexual act.
One leaned to Darak and said urgently: “Let some of us come with you. Don’t trust the bitch.”
Darak rose and stretched. The big muscles cracked and slid under his bronze skin.
“The day Darak is afraid to go into the trees with a girl, you can get yourselves a new leader.”
He came over to me, got my wrist, and took me out of the courtyard, taking great strides so that I stumbled and had to run to keep up. They laughed behind us, all except the man I had kicked, who was groaning and weeping on the ground.
We came into the terrible dead land near the lake. Great stretches of burned trees, brittle but still standing, where the night wind snapped twigs, and blew off a fine black powder in our faces. Only the water seemed clean. A moon was rising, red, and blurred at one edge as it melted into its wane.
In a way I was surprised he had not pushed me over and had me as soon as we came into the terrible trees. He was a hot hardness beside me, a little afraid without properly knowing it, sexually excited, I sensed. He still had my wrist, and now I pulled away.
“Is here far enough for the goddess?” he asked with stinging politeness. I wondered if he would ask next, equally biting and conscientious, should he spread his cloak for me?
“No,” I said, “a little farther. There is a place for all things, and this is not that place.”
I went on ahead now, toward the shore. I recalled the great sharp stones I had seen lying there.
My feet in the cinders, the water ahead of me, I said to him: “Look around us. Make sure there is no one here.”
“You look, goddess,” he said. “Your immortal eyes should be better than mine.”
So I looked. Then I crouched down, beckoned him to do likewise, spreading my hand as if to steady myself, and finding, without my eyes, a stone so perfect I might have planted it here purposely. My right hand was on the hook of the mask, and he watched, fascinated despite himself, the old rotten superstition overcoming him again. He was breathing fast, his eyes on mine, and my left hand jumped forward and the stone struck him on the forehead near the temple. It should have been a blow hard enough to kill, but perhaps I was off-balance myself, as I had made sure he should be; and besides, he knew in the last instant, and tried to throw himself aside, and he was very quick and strong. In any case, it was hard for me to kill Darak, and he meant more to me than my anger would let me know.