“I will do as you say,” he said gently.
“I'll bring food and water when I can. There won't be much. Water enough, but not much food for a while; I'm getting hungry, do you see? But enough to stay alive on. I may not be able to come back for a day or two days, perhaps even longer. I must get Kossil off the track. But I will come. I promise. Here's the flask. Hoard it, I can't come back soon. But I will come back.”
He raised his face to her. His expression was strange. “Take care, Tenar,” he said.
Names
She brought Manan back through the winding ways in the dark, and left him in the dark of the Undertomb, to dig the grave that must be there as proof to Kossil that the thief had indeed been punished. It was late, and she went straight to the Small House to bed. In the night she woke suddenly; she remembered that she had left her cloak in the Painted Room. He would have nothing for warmth in that dank vault but his own short cloak, no bed but the dusty stone. A cold grave, a cold grave, she thought miserably, but she was too weary to wake up fully, and soon slipped back into sleep. She began to dream. She dreamt of the souls of the dead on the walls of the Painted Room, the figures like great bedraggled birds with human hands and feet and faces, squatting in the dust of the dark places. They could not fly. Clay was their food and dust their drink. They were the souls of those not reborn, the ancient peoples and the unbelievers, those whom the Nameless Ones devoured. They squatted all around her in the shadows, and a faint creaking or cheeping sound came from them now and then. One of them came up quite close to her. She was afraid at first and tried to draw away, but could not move. This one had the face of a bird, not a human face; but its hair was golden, and it said in, a woman's voice, “Tenar,” tenderly, softly, “Tenar.”
She woke. Her mouth was stopped with clay. She lay in a stone tomb, underground. Her arms and legs were bound with graveclothes and she could not move or speak.
Her despair grew so great that it burst her breast open and like a bird of fire shattered the stone and broke out into the light of daythe light of day, faint in her windowless room.
Really awake this time, she sat up, worn out by that night's dreaming, her mind befogged. She got into her clothes, and went out to the cistern in the walled courtyard of the Small House. She plunged her arms and face, her whole head, into the icy water until her body jumped with cold and her blood raced. Then flinging back her dripping hair she stood erect and looked up into the morning sky.
It was not long past sunrise, a fair winter's day. The sky was yellowish, very clear. High up, so high he caught the sunlight and burned like a fleck of gold, a bird was circling, a hawk or desert eagle.
“I am Tenar,” she said, not aloud, and she shook with cold, and terror, and exultation, there under the open, sunwashed sky. “I have my name back. I am Tenar!”
The golden fleck veered westward towards the mountains, out of sight. Sunrise gilded the eaves of the Small House. Sheep bells clanked, down in the folds. The smells of woodsmoke and buckwheat porridge from the kitchen chimneys drifted on the fine, fresh wind.
“I am so hungry… How did he know? How did he know my name?… Oh, I've got to go eat, I'm so hungry…”
She pulled up her hood and ran off to breakfast.
Food, after three days of semi-fasting, made her feel solid, gave her ballast; she didn't feel so wild and lighthearted and frightened. She felt quite capable of handling Kossil, after breakfast.
She came up beside the tall, stout figure on the way out of the dining hall of the Big House, and said in a low voice, “I have done away with the robber… What a fine day it is!”
The cold gray eyes looked sidelong at her from the black hood.
“I thought that the Priestess must abstain from eating for three days after a human sacrifice?”
This was true. Arha had forgotten it, and her face showed that she had forgotten.
“He is not dead yet,” she said at last, trying to feign the indifferent tone that had come so easily a moment ago. “He is buried alive. Under the Tombs. In a coffin. There will be some air, the coffin isn't sealed, it's a wooden one. It will go quite slowly; the dying. When I know he is dead then I'll begin the fast.”
“How will you know?”
Flustered, she hesitated again. “I will know. The… My Masters will tell me.”
“I see. Where is the grave?”
“In the Undertomb. I told Manan to dig it beneath the Smooth Stone.” She must not answer so quickly, in that foolish, appeasing tone; she must be on her dignity with Kossil.
“Alive, in a wooden coffin. That's a risky thing with a sorcerer, mistress. Did you make sure his mouth was stopped so he cannot say charms? Are his hands bound? They can weave spells with the motion of a finger, even when their tongues are cut out.”
“There is nothing to his sorcery, it is mere tricking,” the girl said, raising her voice. “He is buried, and my Masters are waiting for his soul. And the rest does not concern you, priestess!”
This time she had gone too far. Others could hear; Penthe and a couple of other girls, Duby, and the priestess Mebbeth, all were in hearing distance. The girls were all ears, and Kossil was aware of it.
“All that happens here is my concern, mistress. All that happens in his realm is the concern of the Godking, the Man Immortal, whose servant I am. Even into the places underground and into the hearts of men does he search and look, and none shall forbid him entrance!”
“I shall. Into the Tombs no one comes if the Nameless Ones forbid it. They were before your Godking and they will be after him. Speak softly of them, priestess. Do not call their vengeance on you. They will come into your dreams, they will enter the dark places in your mind, and you will go mad.”
The girl's eyes were blazing. Kossil's face was hidden, drawn back into the black cowl. Penthe and the others watched, terrified and enthralled.
“They are old,” Kossil's voice said, not loud, a whistling thread of sound out of the depths of the cowl. “They are old. Their worship is forgotten, save in this one place. Their power is gone. They are only shadows. They have no power any more. Do not try to frighten me, Eaten One. You are the First Priestess; does that not mean also that you are the last?… You cannot trick me. I see into your heart. The darkness hides nothing from me. Take care, Arha!”
She turned and went on, with her massive, deliberate steps, crushing the frost-starred weeds under her heavy, sandaled feet, going to the white-pillared house of the Godking.
The girl stood, slight and dark, as if frozen to earth, in the front courtyard of the Big House. Nobody moved, nothing moved, only Kossil, in all the vast landscape of court and temple, hill and desert plain and mountain.
“May the Dark Ones eat your soul, Kossil!” she shouted in a voice like a hawk's scream, and lifting her arm with the hand stretched out stiff, she brought the curse down on the priestess' heavy back, even as she set foot on the steps of her temple. Kossil staggered, but did not stop or turn. She went on, and entered the Godking's door.
Arha spent that day sitting on the lowest step of the Empty Throne. She dared not go into the Labyrinth; she would not go among the other priestesses. A heaviness filled her, and held her there hour after hour in the cold dusk of the great hall. She stared at the pairs of thick pale columns going off into the gloom at the distant end of the hall, and at the shafts of daylight that slanted in from holes in the roof, and at the thick-curling smoke from the bronze tripod of charcoal near the Throne. She made patterns with the little bones of mice on the marble stair, her head bowed, her mind active and yet as if stupefied. Who am I? she asked herself, and got no answer.
Manan came shuffling down the hall between the double rows of columns, when the light had long since ceased to shaft the hall's darkness, and the cold had grown intense. Manan's doughy face was very sad. He stood at a distance from her, his big hands hanging; a torn hem of his rusty cloak dangled by his heel.