“Life—embodied in the symbol of Cah—” cried Arud, striving to teach them.
Panduv thrust him down into the wooden chair. She shut his mouth by putting her hand on it (scandalous). When she moved away, it was to balance on the soles of her feet, fighter’s stance, at the room’s center. She looked about. Everyone waited, even the idiot hiding behind a bench, and the rumbling dog.
“There’s only one means to see if this woman is a cheat,” said Panduv, “or sacred. You can do it here and now, lord Watcher. This man and I will witness. Tell her to demonstrate her abilities.” And turning, Panduv glared at Tibo. “Tell her to call fire.”
Arud was regaining some sense. Shivering, but coherent, he snapped at the outrider to refill his cup.
The dog had stopped growling. Everything was very still. The hearthwood crackled, the beer sounded as it ran into the cup, Tibo stood with her eyes lowered. She was waiting.
She would have done nothing—nothing—until the priest should require it of her.
Arud said, “All right. Let’s see you do that. Bring the fire, as they say you do.” And he drank noisily.
After which it was the quiet again, thick as syrup in the hovel room, the crackle of the hearth absorbed away into it. And then they heard Tibo breathing, audibly, deep, catching breaths—like a woman with her lover—
She will do this. It’s impossible and it will be done, Panduv thought. No trickery, a truth. The Fire of Zarduk.
Tibo extended her left arm. Her eyes were upturned, the whites visible. All at once the sound of her breathing stopped.
The Zakorian saw Tibo’s left breast gleaming like a lamp through the thin stuff of her garment. The light spread, into the shoulder, the upper arm. The forearm bloomed red as roses—it was the blood inside the skin—and the bones showed black. Then the left hand of Tibo became a torch, and from the four fingers and the thumb there pierced five spurts of living fire.
The outrider yelled. Arud had dropped the cup, for Panduv heard it rolling. The idiot and the dog, they only looked on, interested, accustomed, without a trace of fear. (The dog even wagged her tail.)
The flames, hitting the floor, leapt and twined. A fire dance. Then Tibo sighed. She began to breathe again, and her arm, shoulder and breast abruptly darkened like a dying coal.
Arud came plunging forward.
“It isn’t real. Illusion—ah!” He drew out singed fingers, beat at his smoking robe.
Tibo gazed down upon the fire.
“Hush,” she murmured. “So.”
And the fire went out.
Arud said, “It burned me.”
Between them, Panduv and the outrider caught him this time as he fell.
“He’s sleeping most serenely. What herb was that?” “It has an upland name. But I could show you.”
Panduv had administered the drink to Arud. For half an hour after swallowing it, he sweated profusely, and then sank back into a level slumber. The outrider stationed at the entry of the sleeping-place was by contrast wide awake, his teeth gritted and the knife lying across his knees.
Panduv and Tibo returned to the hearth. Orhn also slept on the bench, the dog dozing with her head in his lap.
“This life suits you then,” said Panduv presently.
“To what other life should I go?”
Panduv examined the words. They applied in due course to herself. She had already said them. Besides, she had tonight, even loathing his actions, defended Arud. She discovered in herself a tug toward him, a deep-seated moderating attachment. She had already tutored him in many ways. There was much that might be done—not to change him, but to allow him to be the man she had once or twice glimpsed under the flaccidity, the bludgeoning nonsense. This was rather dismal, that she had come to have such feelings for an Iscaian priest. But this was what fate had given her, and the gods. And Zarduk, whom she had worshiped in the tall temple at Saardsinmey, here he had let fall the bane-benison of his fire on an outlander who did not even honor him.
“However,” said Panduv, “we were going to talk of your son, Rehger. That was how the name was spoken, in Alisaar. Come now, your Orhn wasn’t his father.”
Tibo looked into the common flames of the hearth which she had summoned with flint and tinder.
“A man came here, once.”
“Your lover.”
“For a night. Cah sent him to me. I thought he’d leave me nothing. But I was childed by him.”
Panduv stayed silent, but Tibo said nothing else. So then Panduv recounted the youth and manhood of a Swordsman, of Rehger, in the courts of Daigoth. At first the story was objective. Then it became mixed with her own, the training which she had undergone—Next, the enormous sealed vista of that lost world opened before Panduv, and she flung it out before Tibo in turn, in the hearthlight, like a carpet of many colors. Woven there, the trials and failures, the excellences and the rewards. Woven there the city, its squares and avenues, the adulation of the crowds, and the ringing of the sea. The markers of the festivals, she related, the seasons of its calendar. The night of the Fire Ride, and how Rehger had won it. She conjured Rehger, as if she, too, were a witch, there into the hovel, and caused him to stand before his mother, in beauty and pride. Panduv herself hung the last garland on his golden brow: She made him from the night, as he had partly been, the cipher for Saardsinmey.
And after that, when the hearthlight guttered—she had talked for more than an hour—it came time to tell of the end of the city and of Rehger’s death. And only then, Panduv recalled the dream she had been having, in the Cah temple of Ly. The Amanackire girl who said to her: “Your well-built, obdurate tomb. There he was—when the wave broke.” And the Zakorian, explaining the destruction she had never seen, of her city which was not hers, to a woman who surely could not, being ignorant for all her sorcery, comprehend half of that which Panduv specified—Panduv found herself saying, “But someone assured me, Tibo, that your son survived the cataclysm. It may not be a fact. You’re a witch, perhaps you can divine. If he’s alive.”
But Tibo was looking away and away into and beyond the ashes on the hearth. In the new silence, Panduv felt her own exhaustion. She was wrung out. She had made confession and she was purged, she was empty. She could have wept at last, but she scorned tears, the Zakorian. Fire not water.
When Tibo rose, Panduv looked up at her in a vague surprise.
“Consent to come with me. There’s something I’ll show you,” said Tibo.
Not a whisper about her son, not a glimmer of that hurt and cruel fury that had been in her face before. Nothing. Had she even heard, this Iscaian drab, even noticed the jewelry carpet of a city laid before her?
Panduv got to her feet.
“What is it?”
“Outside, a little way.”
Panduv’s instinct verged on distrust, but she said, “If you like.”
They stole out of the house, and by the door Tibo took a lantern, and with the flint she lighted it. Panduv said scathingly, “The god will be glad you don’t waste his fire.” But Tibo, of course, did not reply.
They walked through the summer night, across the pasture where the cows lay like boulders under a slender tree. A stone wall had mostly come down, and over it they went into the citrus trees and the standing rocks.
The beacon of the lantern disorganized rather than assisted vision. When it smote on the dome, this seemed an error of the eyes. Then the light steadied. It hardened into being.
“What is that?” Panduv recollected now having sighted the shining top of this object as Arud approached the farm.
Tibo said quietly, “It was always there, underneath. But the trees grew bigger, the roots pushed off the soil. Last summer, the earth shook and lifted it up.” At her words, Panduv envisaged the pale smooth thing, rising like a fish, through the tide of the earth-tremor. It did not seem to be all above ground even now, but wedged into a socket of stone. The form of it was nonetheless like the shape of the fish of her imagery. The material of which it was made appeared metallic, but there was not a scratch or pock upon it. No mark at all.