He had not spoken to me since the night on the cinder slope. All his words had come secondhand, from the mouths of others: “Darak says you are to have this,” “Darak has told me to tell you.”
At night, when he made camp, leather tents went up, painted with five or six colors. One of these was given to me, and here I could be as private as I wished. I ate a little when I must, and the pains grew easier, but never failed to come. The quietest of the bandit girls brought me the food and whatever other comforts Darak thought I might need. She said nothing, but her eyes darted, bright and black, like two agate wasps set in her head.
On the dawn of the fourth day, a man came with a snakebite, his arm swollen and black. He swaggered in through the tent flap, anxious to be cured without losing the arm, anxious, too, to show he set no store by me. If I did him good, that was an accident of his fortune. He was at pains to tell me what he had been at when the snake got him, which was squatting among the rocks relieving himself.
I touched the swollen flesh and looked in his face. He had no blind belief to take the healing from me, as they had in the village.
“I cannot help you,” I said.
He was sweating, and in pain, but he glared at me and lifted his good hand as if to cuff me; then thought better of it.
“You’re the healer. That’s why Darak brought you. So heal me, you bitch.”
A small door opened in my mind. I recalled something, but not much.
I drew his knife out of his belt, and he flinched nervously. I took it and dipped it in the flames of the little brazier the girl brought me at night. I got his arm again.
“Hold still,” I said, and made the quick incision before he could protest. He roared like a bull. “Now suck,” I said, “suck and spit.”
He sat with his mouth wide open, amazed at my abrupt movement and the order—crude in its basic simplicity.
“Do as I say,” I added, “before the whole of your body swells up and blackens too.”
That galvanized him into activity. Kneeling in my tent, he set to work with frantic, wide-eyed speed.
In the middle of this, Darak’s hand pulled the tent-flap wide, and he looked in. He had avoided me till now, and today had been away early, hunting; what had brought him here, I did not know. He stared in amazement for a moment at the rhythmically swaying, sucking, spitting bandit before me, then laughed.
“Some new ritual to the goddess,” he said, and went away.
The man cured himself, but it was mere luck.
The day after that, the hills were at their highest and most barren, the soil eroded, the bare rock flanks lying like great tortoises in the sun.
A group of tall trees, elegant and thin as some women can be, stood ahead of us. Foliage rested like black ribbon clouds on their tops, and at intervals in the upper branches. At sun set we began to climb toward these trees, up a flight of natural steps, the broad terraces of the hill. I knew from their urgings, jokes, and different manner all around, that we were almost in the camp now, but I could not tell where it might be. The horses’ small sure feet beat under us like little clocks. Even Darak’s horse was quieter, better and more stable, as it sensed its home. Overhead the red sky was purpling, and the stars were coming through. One fell, beyond the hills it seemed, into the plains there, with a train of golden fire. A bandit girl pointed to it, calling to us to look, but it was gone. I knew enough of their old beliefs—not only from their stories, but from the way they spoke of many things. Men who had not feared the She-One had been reared on other milk, and feared instead the earthshaking serpent, or the grave of murderers.
There were terrors in all of them, how ever well they plastered them over with experience and boasting.
The falling star had perhaps been, to the bandit girl, a god, visiting from his sky-house. To another of them it was a warrior’s death as he fell in battle.
Already I knew them a little. A sort of kinship had linked me to them beyond what linked me to Darak, even though I was not of them, and their ways disgusted me. Even he, the one I followed here, was their clay, not mine.
A crack of thunder split the sky across. Darak’s horse reared and plunged, its feet kicking loose stones downward to the lower slopes. A blazing dry wind tore by us and was gone, but away behind us the sky was suddenly scarlet and alive.
“Makkatt!” one of the men shouted. It was their name for the volcano.
We turned in our saddles on the uneasy horses, and stared back to the light in the sky.
One of the village boys, who had come with us, began to yell and weep. The nearest bandit struck him into silence.
It was very quick. The sky was red, then orange, then a filthy yellow, then bloodied and muddied back into darkness, leaving only the half-glow low on the horizon, which was the burning villages. The sound came late to us, rumbled deeply, and was gone.
I looked at Darak, and his face was hard and shut. But I knew behind his eyes, as behind mine, the thought of the village would not be still.
Their goddess abandoned them, and the wrath of the mountain came in her wake.
I remembered the altar of Evil, so far away reality had almost faded it. I remembered the voice in my skulclass="underline" You are cursed, and carry a curse with you; there will be no happiness.
With a silence on us now, and the reddish lamp still alight behind us, we came up to the trees an hour later.
A rider near Darak made a sound in his throat like the barking of a hill-fox, twice, then again twice, and was answered from the trees. Three or four men untwisted themselves from the shadows, and ran up. I saw the glint of knives, but it was all formality. They must have been able to see us for hours.
A few moments in talk, gesticulations backward toward Makkatt, then we were going on, through the trees, among high jutting rocks. Three more halts and signalings with sentries—elaborate birdcalls and passwords—the gaudy toys of dangerous and well-organized men.
Then the ground seemed to open in front of us. I looked between the rock, and saw, carved through the hills, a long ravine. It was about four miles in length and perhaps a mile across, and overhung by the slopes on every side. Trees leaned over it, pines and staggering larches. Grass grew in the bowl, and pasture land where there would be brown cattle and wild little sheep. On the east side a waterfall smoked down, and there was other smoke also—and the glint of cluster upon cluster of cooking fires, outside and around the lanes of leather tents.
In the black of night, the downward track was hard and treacherous. Men cursed and horses stumbled, and little things ran away skittering, with bright eyes.
Nearer and nearer the fire blur, the smell of food and huddle and closeness. There seemed no way out now up the steep sides of the ravine.
The track widened out. We were on level ground.
Darak swung down from the horse, his men following his example. Boys came and took their mounts away to horse pens up against the escarpment, but Barak’s horse was taken somewhere else. The place jumped in the firelight, unsteady and uncertain.
I sat still on the mule, waiting.
Darak turned abruptly and came back to me.
I looked down at his face but it was all one with the moving, twisting light. I could not be sure what his look or his eyes said to me.
“They’ll put up your tent for you over there, near the waterfall. I’ll send the girl to take care of your wants—a sort of servant, but she won’t say much about it. If you need any thing, get word to me. You’re free to do as you like here.”
“Oh, yes?” I said softly.
His narrow eyes narrowed further until they were glittering slits.