“There has been no Watcher here for three generations,” the girls told each other, their sleepy sulky voices brighter and more wakeful. They ate heartily, washed and rubbed and oiled their bodies and their hair continuously, lying out in the sunlight like sleek fat cats with glistening fur.
“So he’s powerful, this priest?” said Panduv to Selleb, as they lay side by side at midnight.
“You’re wondering what can be made of that,” murmured Selleb.
“And you are too clever,” said Panduv. “Why aren’t you a porridge-brain like the others?”
“I have heard, he must go on a journey up into the mountains. A town or village there has come to the attention of the Mother Temple. I’ve heard, he likes women very much.”
“Then he’ll likely have women with him, don’t you think?”
“No. He tired of them and left them or sold them for funds.”
“Yes,” said Panduv, “I, too, have used lovers casually.”
Arud, Cah’s Watcher, entered a minor port of Iscah to which his duty had taken him, in the last phase of Zastis, and the heat of late afternoon. He had been three days on winding trails, in the dust, without a woman or a bath. He was saddle-stiff, since the munificence of the capital ran to zeebas, sore from the stings of insects, red-eyed and ill-tempered. His mood was not eased, moreover, by knowing that the road from this wretched haven would be longer, drier, dustier and more difficult, and end at an anthill even less prepossessing.
The port—shoddy—did not attract Arud’s attention. His mount clumped through, the four outriders and baggage trundling after, while the people in the streets made way and offered pious obeisance. The temple, its pillars unpainted and crows sitting in the trees around, was much as he had expected. He had seen five such already on his trek.
The High Priest came out to greet Arud, then there followed a ceremony in the temple, before the High Altar. (Arud would gladly have dispensed with it, but one could not insult Cah.) Thereafter a room was provided in which to steam, and a tepid sluice, and a couch in an odd triangular chamber. To this you were driven. To find relief in such small things.
Exhausted, longing to sleep, Arud lay on the bed and could not close his eyes. He was thinking resentfully of the jealousy of others in the Mother Temple which had sent him on this mission. Ostensibly it was to show him off, and win him a promotion, maybe. But frankly such Watcher jaunts were the traditional way of being rid of an unpopular and ambitious brat. The five temples already visited, and this, were routine matters enough. But the expedition to come, up into the mountain valleys, to a town not even paying revenue more than once in ten years, would prove irksome and arduous. There had been rumors of curious goings-on there, trickling out with roving traders, bandits. Doubtless these tales were no more than nonsense, but the Watcher had been asked to investigate. They had dispatched him miles down to the coast firstly, to irritate him properly before the worst part of the journey should begin. It had already been half a month’s excursion. The uphill work would take longer.
With an oath, Arud turned on his stomach. (He was a comely young man, with an unshaven shock of springing hair.) Cah confound his envious detractors! And it was still Zastis—He quietened his fretfulness. There were girls here, big soft pillows of feminine compliance. He would be offered comforts. He could throw his weight about, for if he spoke poorly of them to the capital, Cah rescue them.
Forget the damnable journey and the bump of mud town on its mountain climb ahead.
He thought, as sleep began to come, of his father’s pride which had put the second eldest son into the temple. He thought of Cah, in whom he believed, but in an aloof, mathematical way. Arud was of a new persuasion. Not a heretic certainly, but a seeker after truth. Cah was an ultimate symbol, her rituals the correct reverence that an ultimate anything should command. Before the black stones of the Cah’s Arud bowed down, but he did not reckon Cah was especially in them. Cah was everywhere, and everything, the principle of life. ... As for mountain miracles—no. There were things explicable and there were lies. Arud slept. The bed became a woman.
After the evening meal, which was served early, the holy-girls trooped out of the yard and up an inner stair that led into the temple section of the precinct. Timing perfect, the brothel had been closed to ordinary patrons since the previous sunset. Each girl was cleansed and fresh, burnished and perfumed, with brass, copper and enamel glinting and clicking upon her.
Panduv, having no appropriate ornaments, and only the colorless gauze shift the mistress had awarded her, begged no bauble and made no show. Nevertheless, her fall of jetty hair had swiftly grown in confinement, and swung beneath her shoulders now. She had roped her waist with some twisted red cord found discarded by Selleb’s loom. Panduv was so unlike the other women, holding herself so straight, so black, so supple and so slender, she made a show regardless. Indeed, she moved one or two of the sisterhood to spite, to pinch her slim flesh and remark that she had better stand under a lamp, or she would never be seen at all.
They entered the corridor in which these whores stood or sat by day, to be chosen. Each girl took up a familiar position, leaning this way, or that, her hand on her swelling hip, or toying with her plaits and curls. Lamps of oil with two or three wicks shone with a dark fluttering glow.
Then footsteps approached, and great shadows rushed along the tunnel of women and lights, making all totter and fragment, as if shattered, falsely.
The mistress came first, slapping down her flat feet. She carried a rod of office tipped by a phallic copper bud. She looked expressionless on her holy-girls. Behind her walked the Watcher, the High Priest at his side, the Watcher inspecting the line of whores. They, since he was a man, lowered their eyes from his face. Panduv did not lower her eyes. The High Priest met the bold gaze with affront and some startlement, for he had not expected her inclusion in the line of choice—she had never been offered previously, being unacceptable. The Watcher, however, had hesitated.
Arud also was taken aback to find a black Zakorian before him, there among the soft pigeons, her eyes staring openly into his.
Panduv meanwhile had surprised herself. She had put herself into the line without the order of the mistress. Her plan was mostly formless and had nothing to do with sex. But it was still Zastis, and her preference being for men, Selleb had not sated her. This Watcher priest was young, and handsome, and though his body did not have the honed edge of Daigoth’s courts, he was only soft in the way her actor-lover had been, or the princes she had favored. She felt, in fact, a brilliance of desire. Holding his eyes, she partly veiled her own with the long black lashes, not subservience, the play of a fan, to let him see her awareness of him, as a man.
Next moment he was moving on along the line of cinnamon flesh. He continued to the corridor’s end, paused, and, in conversation now with the High Priest, went away. The mistress, informed of his selection, come back down the corridor, tapping the rod upon her hand.
She stopped before Panduv and said, coldly, “Go to the three-sided chamber. Serve Cah, and please him.”
And reaching past her, tapped the rod on the shoulder of Selleb.
A gentle scratching at the door in the hour before sunrise, did not rouse Panduv. She was already wide awake. The pettiness of her own anger at a backland priestling’s refusal had kept her primed all night.
Yet, as Selleb slipped into the room, Panduv made pretence of awakening. This, too, was petty.
“Well, did you please?” she said.
“Greatly.”
“Did he please you?”
“Ah,” said Selleb, “the touch of men means very little to me. Before Cah, I make believe.” She added, “He’s to be here another night.”