"But—little girl—" Domaris, at a loss for words, lay still, looking up into the quiet eyes. After a long moment, the child's dreamy face darkened again.
"Kiha," Tiriki whispered, with strange intentness, "when—where—where and when was it? You said—you told me ..." She stopped, her eyes concentrated in an aching search of the woman's face, her brows knitted in a terrible intensity. "Oh, Kiha, why is it so hard to remember?"
"Remember what, Tiriki?"
The girl closed her eyes. "It was you—you said to me—" The great eyes opened, haunted, and Tiriki whispered, "Sister—and more than sister—here we two, women and sisters—pledge thee, Mother—where we stand in darkness." Her voice thickened, and she sobbed.
Domaris gasped. "You don't remember, you can't! Eilantha, you cannot, you have been spying, listening, you could not ..."
Tiriki said passionately, "No, no, it was you, Kiha! It was! I remember, but it's like—a dream, like dreaming about a dream."
"Tiriki, my baby-girl—you are talking like a mad child, you are talking about something which happened before ..."
"It did happen, then! It did! Do you want me to tell you the rest?" Tiriki stormed. "Why won't you believe me?"
"But it was before you were born!" Domaris gasped. "How can this be?"
White-faced, her eyes burning, Tiriki repeated the words of the ritual without stumbling—but she had spoken only a few lines when Domaris, pale as Death, checked her. "No, no Eilantha! Stop! You mustn't repeat those words! Not ever, ever—until you know what they mean! What they imply ..." She held out exhausted, wasted arms. "Promise me!"
Tiriki subsided in stormy sobs against her foster-mother's breast; but at last muttered her promise.
"Some day—and if I cannot, Deoris will tell you about it. One day—you were made Devotee, dedicated to Caratra before your birth, and one day ..."
"You had better let me tell her now," said Deoris quietly from the doorway. "Forgive me, Domaris; I could not help but hear."
But Tiriki leaped up, raging. "You! You had to come—to listen, to spy on me! You can never let me have a moment alone with Kiha Domaris, you are jealous because I can help her and you cannot! I hate you! I hate you, Deoris!" She was sobbing furiously, and Deoris stood, stricken, for Domaris had beckoned Tiriki to her and her daughter was crying helplessly in her sister's arms, her face hidden on Domaris's shoulder as the woman held her with anxious, oblivious tenderness. Deoris bent her head and turned to go, without a word, when Domaris spoke.
"Tiriki, hush, my child," she commanded. "Deoris, come here to me—no, there, close to me, darling. You too, baby." she added to Tiriki, who had drawn a little away and was looking at Deoris with resentful jealousy. Domaris, laid one of her worn, wax-white hands in Tiriki's and stretched out her other hand to Deoris. "Now, both of you," Domaris whispered, "listen to me—for this may be the last time I can ever talk to you like this—the last time."
Chapter Nine: THE SEA AND THE SHIP
I
As summer gave way to autumn, even the children abandoned the hope and pretense that Domaris might recover. Day after day she lay in her high room, watching the sun flicker on the white waves, dreaming. Sometimes when one of the high-bannered wing-bird ships slid over the horizon, she wondered if Rajasta had received her message ... but not even that seemed important any more. Days, then months slipped over her head, and with each day she grew paler, more strengthless, worn with pain brought to the point beyond which even pain cannot go, weary even with the effort of drawing breath to live.
The old master, Rathor, came once and stood for a long time close to her bedside, his hand between her two pale ones and his old blind eyes bent upon her worn face as if they saw not some faraway and distant thing, but the face of the dying woman.
As the year turned again, Deoris, pale with long nights and days of nursing her sister, was commanded unequivocally to take more rest; much of the time, now, Domaris did not know her, and there was little that anyone could do. Reluctantly, Deoris left her sister to the hands of the other Healer-priestesses, and—one morning—took her children to the seashore. Micail joined them there, for since his mother's illness he had seen little of Tiriki. Micail was to remember this day, afterward, as the last day he was a child among children.
Tiriki, her long pale hair all unbraided, dragged her little brother by the hand as she flew here and there. Micail raced after them, and all three went wild with shouting and splashing and rowdy playing, chasing in and out of the sloshing waves on the sand. Even Deoris flung away her sandals and dashed gaily into the tidewaters with them. When they tired of this, Tiriki began to build in the sand for her little brother, while Micail picked up shells at the high-water mark and dumped them into Tiriki's lap.
Deoris, sitting on a large sun-warmed rock to watch them, thought, They are only playing at being children, for Nari's sake and mine. They have grown up, those two, while I have been absorbed in Domaris ... It did not seem quite right, to Deoris, that a boy of sixteen and a girl of thirteen should be so mature, so serious, so adult—though they were acting, now, like children half their age!
But they quieted at last, and lay on the sand at Deoris's feet, calling on her to admire their sand-sculpture.
"Look," said Micail, "a palace, and a Temple!"
"See my pyramid?" little Nari demanded shrilly.
Tiriki pointed. "From here, the palace is like a jewel set atop a green hill . . . Reio-ta told me, once... ." Abruptly she sat up and demanded, "Deoris, did I ever have a real father? I love Reio-ta as if he truly were my father, but—you and Kiha Domaris are sisters; and Reio-ta is the brother of Micail's father . . ." Breaking off again, she glanced unquietly at Micail.
He understood what she meant immediately, and reached out to tweak her ear—but his impulse changed, and he only twitched it playfully instead.
Deoris looked soberly at her daughter. "Of course, Tiriki. But your father died—before you could be acknowledged."
"What was he like?" the girl asked, reflectively.
Before Deoris could answer, little Nari looked up with pouting scorn. "If he died before 'nowledging her, how could he be her father?" he asked, with devastating small-boy logic. He poked a chubby finger into his half-sister's ribs. "Dig me a hole, Tiriki!"
"Silly baby," Micail rebuked him.
Nari scowled. "Not a baby," he insisted. "My father was a Priest!"
"So was Micail's, Nari; so was Tiriki's," Deoris said gently. "We are all the children of Priests here."
But Nari only returned to the paradox he had seized on with new vigor. "If Tiriki's father died before she was born, then she don't have a father because he wasn't live to be her father!"
Micail, tickled by the whimsy of Nari's childish innocence, grinned delightedly. Even Tiriki giggled—then sobered, seeing the look on Deoris's face.
"Don't you want to talk about him?"
Again pain twisted oddly in Deoris's heart. Sometimes for months she did not think of Riveda at all—then a chance word or gesture from Tiriki would bring him back, and stir again that taut, half-sweet aching within her. Riveda was burned on her soul as ineradicably as the dorje scars on her breasts, but she had learned calm and control. After a moment she spoke, and her voice was perfectly steady. "He was an Adept of the Magicians, Tiriki."
"A Priest, like Micail's father, you said?"
"No, child, nothing like Micail's father. I said he was a Priest, because—well the Adepts are like Priests, of a sort. But your father was of the Grey-robe sect, though they are not regarded so highly in the Ancient Land. And he was a Northman of Zaiadan; you have your hair and eyes from him. He was a Healer of great skill."
"What was his name?" Tiriki asked intently.