There came a morning, when she was walking behind his zeeba, that he called to her.
“I suppose you believe in magic and miracles?” he said.
It was the first time he had asked her opinion.
She was not misled into thinking he wanted it.
“In what way do you mean?”
“This dung-heap I’m to go to, there’s been a rumor—Things that can’t happen do so, allegedly.”
Panduv was silent, attentive, respectful, striding by the zeeba. (Involved in an art form, she was no longer appalled at the act.)
Arud, who had never inquired even to that minute anything about her, taking it for granted presumably she came from Var-Zakoris, said, “This town, it’s not so far from the border. Have you heard anything of it? A weh called Ly Dis.”
Panduv felt a start of unnamable emotion. She went on striding, but her body seemed internally scalded.
“I’ve heard of Ly Dis. I knew a man born there, a village there.”
Abruptly, Arud was glaring down at her.
“Your lover?”
At last, a personal question. Panduv might have been tickled. He was put out at the idea of her having been selected by another man, in the days of her freedom.
“No. Not a lover.” She visualized Rehger Am Ly Dis. As bright as the sun, handsome as the Lydian. . . . She had not known him well, not as a man. He was one of the heroes, as she was. Her brother from the courts, child of her huge family.
“What’s the matter?” said Arud. “If he wasn’t a lover.”
But he did not wish to hear her history. And she did not wish to offer it. Rehger must have perished. With all the rest, he had been smashed and swept away. He, like herself, had died before his time.
They reached Ly Dis in a summer storm, dry, blustering with thunder, dust and wind. Bone-naked lightnings tore about the mountainheads above. They were so tall, those upper pinnacles, they had seemed, since appearing, to invite an aerial attack. Ly Dis town lay in a cradle of the lower crags, on whose levels the travelers had been for forty days of their monotonous ascending and descending. (The routes were easier and quicker from the capital—Arud had never ceased telling her.) The valley-cradle was .untidy, and the town, blathered by the storm, like a heap of stones.
Only a handful of beggars were on the dirt streets, huddled in what purported to be doorways. The temple, with the house of the local tyrant, abutted on a single paved square, with a well and a scaffold in close proximity.
The temple was a condensed replica of the fane at the port. The smell at Ly Dis, however, was larger. It stank, of blood, oil, incense, an overpowering odor that dashed at them with the wind.
Arud pulled a face. But he had also been telling Panduv for hundreds of miles that he expected the worst.
Word had been sent ahead long since, of the Watcher’s advent, but it might never have arrived. Certainly, no one came to welcome him. Arud sent one of the outriders into the temple to announce him, and sat his zeeba under the terrace, in the dust-storm, his panoply of baggage, attendants, and jet-black harlot about him, to get his dues.
The High Priest received Arud in a bare stone chamber. The old man—he seemed and moved as if he were ninety—wore his ceremonial regalia, a robe sewn with metal discs and black feathers, and a bird’s mask. Arud, who owed the Priest’s position unstinting reverence, bowed and genuflected, leering with scorn. The least acolyte in the capital, to Arud’s mind, was worth more.
No refreshments were offered, neither any ritual at the altar. They hugged Cah close up here, and their victuals tighter.
When the politenesses were done, it became apparent the High One was in some concern lest the visitor be after revenues. Arud must explain such accounts were nothing to do with him. He then coughed, and asked for water to moisten the dust from his throat. (And water was precisely what they brought him, murky at that.)
“It’s this other affair,” said Arud. The bird’s eyes goggled glassily. “Fabrications of wild magic. Healings. Conjurings.”
The High Priest did not move. The bird’s head did not. Outside the lightning cracked like a whip.
“It has come to the capital in the form of gossip and stories. Nevertheless, it was deemed serious, by the Highest One. I’m here to question you about it.”
Another silence.
“I would like,” said Arud, “to have a word from you, Father.”
The bird’s beak went down. It angled at the floor, and the gnarled old hands gripped the arms of the chair.
“We do not speak much of it.”
“Thinking it beneath your notice?”
“To make it so.”
The rejoinder brought Arud up short.
“That won’t do, High One. You must speak out now, to me. And I shall want to question any of those involved. And the woman.” He had kept himself till now from saying that: The woman. The admission that the tales centered on a female. There were sometimes witches, but they kept to the feminine side, practicing on or against their own sex. It was unlawful but not unholy. This woman, however, was reported to have power over the being of men. Arud credited none of it. He, too, would have preferred not to speak of it, to ignore it and let the falsehoods fade on their own. But the Mother Temple had sent him here to do the opposite. So he lectured the old High Priest for a while on the dreadfulness of not speaking and of striving to ignore, ending with: “And is it a fact? Not that she has any abilities, patently she could not. But that all this concerns a female?”
“So it seems.”
“Seems isn’t good enough. Father. No. You must send for this woman immediately. Have her brought. And perhaps, before I see her I might bathe and—”
“Not here,” said the High Priest, with a twinkle of malice. “I mean that the woman isn’t in this town. In these areas, there is often confusion, the names of places—it’s the village of Ly, that is where the woman is.”
Arud quivered with dire foreknowing. He choked on dust and muddy water, cleared his throat and snarled, “How far is it and where?”
The High Priest pointed upward.
“Five or six days up the mountain. You’ve come at a lucky time. In winter, or during the rains, it would take you much longer.”
The climb took seven days. The air was thinner. Shards and pebbles fell from the passes. The storm came and went. It needed only to rain to wash them away, back down to the heaped stones and the square. But there was no rain. The taller mountains screened the sky, like scored red-bronze in the sunsets.
At the night halts, Arud lay trembling with ire and slight fever, while Panduv bathed his forehead, massaged his feet. Her constitution was more robust than his, and she saw she had started to be indispensable.
The dwellings of Ly were in their cracked summer wholeness, the refuse mounds fermenting at. their doors. On high ground, Cah’s house, smaller even than the temple in the town but smelling as greatly, dominated the prospect.
Only the zeebas and Zakorian Panduv attracted attention on the streets. Filthy and unshaven, Arud, his clothing now totally defaced by the journey, escorted by outriders no better off—and also dwindled, two having gone missing at Ly Dis—might have been any itinerant nobody.
The temple servants who came out to accost Arud on the terrace top were inclined to dismiss his claims. He was driven to giving them secret signs of the religion.
When, finally, he had been taken away into the inner rooms, the outriders, grown desperate, gathered the animals and made for a crude drinking-shop they had seen. Panduv was left with the baggage on the terrace. Glancing up, she saw a square window, with two faceless creatures in it, peering at her: Holy-girls. Seeing her look at them in turn, they averted their eyes, and made superstitious signs. Zakr. Perhaps only to outrage and amaze them further, Panduv walked into the body of the reeking temple.
There were short thick pillars to sustain the roof; they loomed grotesquely, for it was very dark. At the port, she had never entered the temple hall, never observed any sacrament before the altar.