“When you go near enough,” said Tibo, “an opening comes.”
They went forward, very slowly, the lantern engorging everything before them, putting out the rest of the valley.
And, as predicted, a door-opening evolved in the side of the fish-shape mound. Such mechanisms were not unknown. The modern temples of the snake goddess, Panduv had heard, were frequently so equipped. Yet the manner in which the door made itself bewildered her, happening not with an upward, downward or sideways motion, but in a kind of swirling. . . .
Within the door, was only darkness.
“Have you gone inside, Tibo?”
“Never.”
“Afraid to.”
“Yes. Here always, I never like to be here.”
“You’re a sensitive. It must be a bad place, then.”
Panduv took the lantern from her, and, going closer to the opening, let the light press on the darkness.
It was an oval chamber without corners, and again she thought of the white races, tales of the round halls in their ruined city in the southern Plains. Instantly the lantern found a confirmation. There on a featureless wall, what she took for a carving. A coiled, unmistakable snake, white on white.
The Zakorian moved back, so the darkness possessed the hole again.
“It’s a temple. The Plains People had them everywhere, scattered, even in the land of Dorthar. This must be old as the mountains.”
She felt that she was shaking. It was not fear. There was a current of energy in the vicinity of the snake temple, a supernatural force to be avoided, as Tibo said she inclined to. Panduv backed farther and the electric awareness was less. She said, “Why bring me here?”
Tibo said, “Cah is here.”
The Zakorian swore. “No. Cah is a goddess for the Vis. Yours. Mine, maybe. That thing, there, that’s the yellowhairs’ magic. Their goddess, the Lady of Snakes, Anack.”
Tibo said, “Cah forgave my sins. Each month, her hand was on me. When this thing came out of the earth, it was full of Cah. I’m afraid here. Fear doesn’t matter. This place is why I heal and how I bring the fire. I’ve told no one else. It’s Cah’s place.”
“It’s theirs,” said Panduv. She was angry. Stupidly she thought of athletic contests between the dancers of the city and blonde girls of Sh’alis. Inappropriate, yet total—the racial unmeeting, the fight, the war going on in small ways or large. Would Sh’alis not have sung over the battering of Free Alisaar by a white, screaming wave?
Panduv shut her eyes and saw a star dashing, flaming, from the sky. It crashed against the bosom of the earth, seared and split the land, driving a channel, burying itself deep. As the patchy clouds and cinders settled, the star lay smoldering in its ditch, in a valley between mountains.
“There,” said Tibo, as she put her hand on Panduv’s shoulder. “You saw the star? I’ve seen it, too. Cah’s sky-chariot falling. It remembers.”
“Lowland magic, the power of flight,” muttered Panduv. Tibo had taken her hand, and was leading her away from the shining domed mound, temple, fallen star, time-fish, between the citrus trees, into the commonplace pasture where the cows still lay peaceably chewing.
Panduv’s limbs were water. She sat herself on the rough grass before she should stagger, “I don’t like that, it isn’t for me,” she said. She shivered. “But for certain, it had some meaning.”
Tibo loitered patiently until the Zakorian got up again. They returned into the hovel. They did not speak to each other any more.
Lying by Arud on Tibo’s mattress, Panduv dreamed of Saardsinmey after the wave.
She saw initially from high up, as if she flew winged above the wreck. Far below, the landscape was a desert, with jagged monoliths and fanged ravines of masonry. She would not have known it for a city, except she had come there in the dream armed with its former name.
Circling, as once the hunting hawks had done, she descended through the bruised air.
She was impartial, the winged Panduv, in the dream. It did not tear her heart or consciousness, how it was, the sights of it.
On the roof of the Zarduk temple, whose entrails had been wrenched out, a ship rested. She flew by the ship, circling the pillars, and away. Above, there lay the stadium, which, with almost everything, had been obliterated. There was only an abysm—the arena, piled by tumbled things.
North and west, a metropolis of ruins, clung with seaweed, with bits of shells on their stairs and roofs and floors, and dotted with all the feasible remnants of a human society suddenly vanquished.
A wind was blowing. It was clearing off the blots and stains of the atmosphere, and Panduv was blown to earth by it, and alighted, still high over the city, where she might have expected to, on the Street of Tombs.
Everything was mud. The marble seemed mostly to have been turned to mud. And here, too, as she had dimly noted in the shattered ruins beneath, tiny groups of men and women were picking about, like beggars in a gutter after a coin.
Panduv, invisible, poised among the mud hills, and looked at them with mild pity, but no sense of kinship. They were distant in all ways. There, where a white stone had protruded from the clotted slime, someone was grubbing, trying to pull out a corpse by its legs. But there another only sat, and did nothing.
The soul of Panduv—so she supposed it was—began to drift again. It came along a rise, to the sarcophagi of kings and queens, the entertainers. On the incline above rose the black beehive of her own tomb, washed up amid the aloes.
The door stood open on its runner. She recalled . . . Rehger, maybe others, had found shelter there. One of these persons, seemingly left behind, now stepped from the doorway, white out of black.
Panduv was not alone in seeing the phenomenon. Two women a short way down the slope had stopped in their grim pottering. They appeared terrified, as if by an apparition, not realizing that this was only some survivor of the wave like themselves.
The figure was not intrinsically alarming. It was that of a girl, wearing a white dress, her head also veiled by white. She did not stay to gaze about her, but went on, up the incline, away from the black tomb. On the crest of the slope, however, she did hesitate, and next looked back, as if she had become aware of another watcher—Panduv.
The white of her clothing blended subtly with that of her skin and hair. The survivor out of the tomb was the Amanackire.
In the dream Panduv experienced no shred of wrongness. On the eve of nemesis, avoiding the gossip of the theater, she had never heard of the Lowlander’s poisoning, while her actor-lover had been too busy with other commerce to tempt her ears with it. Panduv had not known of the murder, the burial, until that other dream in Ly’s temple. I gave myself to death—The former dreaming, recaptured in this, conveyed only utter correctness.
The Amanackire had died, and by her death, ensured that Rehger might find shelter from destruction. Some days had passed, and Rehger, too, was gone. And rising up in the shadow, healed and whole, the white girl moved out into the world.
Now, drawing her veil over her face, she walked on across the rim of the hill and disappeared from view.
Winged, incorporeal, still Panduv did not follow her.
Instead she woke with a dreadful violence, jammed back into her body, not knowing where she was or what had happened to her. And in the intuitive battle to reclaim her memory and herself, for her heart to beat and her lungs to breathe, this dream, like the other, came undone and flowed away, down again into the sea-depths within her, out of sight and out of mind.
“What am I to tell them, that they could accept, at the Mother Temple?”
Arud voiced his distress twelve days later, when they had got beyond the crow’s nest of Ly Dis, among the enduring sameness of the mountains.