Bradley, Marion Zimmer - SSC 03 Page 6

  She said sharply "What enslaves you to the lute? Are you bound for a space, or forever?"

  "I know not," Koira said, "Or if I know I cannot speakTt."

  So it was often with enchantments; Lythande knew. . . . and now she would have all of time before her, and sooner or later, sooner or later, Koira would love her. . . . Koira .was her slave, she could bid her come and go with her hands on the lute as once they had sought for more than a shared song and a maiden's kiss . . .

  But a slave's counterfeit of love is not love. Lythande raised the lute in her hands, poising her fingers on the strings; Koira's form began to waver a little, and then, acting swiftly before she could think better of it, Lythande raised the lute, brought it crashing down and broke it over her knee.

  Koira's face wavered, between astonishment and sudden delirious happiness. "Free!" she cried, "Free at last—O, Lythande, now do I know you truly loved me. ..." and a whisper swirled and faded and was still, and there was only the empty bubble of magic, void, silent, without light or sound.

  Lythande stood still, the broken lute in her hands. If Rastafyre could only see. She had risked life, sanity, magic, Secret itself and the Blue Star's power, for this lute, and within moments she had broken it and set free the one who could, over the years, been drawn to her, captive . . . unable to refuse, unable to break Lythande's pride further. . . .

  He would think me, too, an incompetent magician.

  I wonder which two of us would be right?

  With a long sigh, Lythande drew the mage-robe about her thin shoulders, made sure the two daggers were secure in their sheaths—for at this hour, in the moonless streets of Old Gandrin there were many dangers, real and magical—and went on her solitary way, stepping over the fragments of the broken lute.

  Introduction to Somebody Else's Magic

  About the time I started writing Lythande stories I was engaged in a series of feminist arguments with people who thought I wasn't sufficiently feminist, or didn't understand what feminism was all about, or something like that. No doubt they are right. Someone criticized Lythande and my other characters for lack of true feminism, and I thought, Yes, perhaps Lythande should have identified herself with woman's magic instead of disguising herself as a male. But had she ever had that option?

  / was convinced that she had not. Lythande's basic decency might guide her to intervene in another person's karma—as in this story, where she attempts (too late) to save a woman from rape, but in a world where the prime directive is not to mind anyone else's business, the penalty for such a thing might be to become entangled in someone else's magic.

  And Lythande's resentment of woman's magic is simple: where was this woman's magic when I needed it? No doubt, Lythande would have preferred it to magic where she must compete with men at their own carefully guarded game. But such women as the first few to enter medical colleges (where they were preached against in church, ignored, and finally forced to fight through by being at least twice as good as men)—women who have proved themselves competing against men are not very sympathetic to the protected women's spaces and quotas. "Of course," we say, "you can do it under those conditions—but we suspect you couldn't have done it at all in the days when you had to prove yourself. Do you want everyone saying that you only got into medical school, not because you were good enough, but because they had to give so many places to women, qualified or not?"

  No doubt women and other minorities will tell me again that I just don't understand . . . sure that if I only understood I would certainly agree with them. Wrong. I understand, all right, 1 just don't agree. Like Lythande, I won my credentials when it had to be done the hard way . . . not protected by special consideration for minorities .Women who had to be at least twice as good as men don't take kindly to such comments as, "When will women be allowed to be mediocre, as men are allowed to be mediocre?"

  I think no one should be allowed to be mediocre, or ask it, or think of it. Lythande—and I—are content to be judged simply by what we are.

  But I find I am writing something almost like feminist rhetoric here. Forgive me. Lythande can speak for herself, but I must editorialize.

  SOMEBODY ELSE’S MAGIC

  In a place like the Thieves' Quarter of Old Gandrin, there is no survival skill more impo'rtant than the ability to mind your own business. Come robbery, rape, arson, blood feud, or the strange doings of wizards, a carefully cultivated deaf ear for other people's problem;?— not to mention a blind eye, or better, two, for anything that is not your affair—is the best way, maybe the only way, to keep out of trouble.

  It is no accident that everywhere in Old Gandrin, and everywhere else under the Twin Suns, they speak of the blinded eye of Keth-Ketha. A god knows better than to watch the doings of his creatures too carefully.

  Lythande, the mercenary-magician, knew this perfectly well. When the first scream rang down the quarter, despite an involuntary shoulder twitch, Lythande knew that the proper thing was to look straight ahead and keep right on walking in the same direction. It was one of the reasons why Lythande had survived this long; through cultivating superb skill at own-business-minding in a place where there were a variety of strange businesses to be minded.

  Yet there was a certain note to the screams—

  Ordinary robbery or even rape might not have penetrated that carefully cultivated shell of blindness, deafness, looking straight into the thick of it. Lythande's hand gripped almost without thought at the hilt of the right-hand knife, the black-handled one that hung from the red girdle knotted over the magerrobe, flipped it out, and ran straight into trouble.

  The woman was lying on the ground now, and there had been at least a dozen of them, long odds even for the Thieves Quarter. Somehow, before they had gotten her down, she had managed to kill at least four of them, but there were others, standing around and cheering the survivors on. The Blue Star between Lythande's brows, the mark of a Pilgrim Adept, had begun to glow and flicker with blue lightnings, in time with the in-and-out flicker of the blade. Two, then three went down before they knew what had hit them, and a fourth was spitted in the middle of his foul work, ejaculating and dying with a single cry. Two more fell, spouting blood, one from a headless neck, the other falling sidewise, unbalanced by an arm lopped away at the shoulder, bled out before he hit the ground. The rest took to their heels, shrieking. Lythande wiped the blade on the cloak of one of the dead men and bent over the dying woman.

  She was small and frail to have done so much damage to her assailants; and they had made her pay for it. She wore the leather garments of a swordsman; they had been ripped off her, and she was bleeding everywhere, but she was not defeated—even now she made a feeble gesture toward her sword and snarled, her bitten lips drawn back over bared teeth, "Wait ten minutes, animal, and I will be beyond caring; then you may take your pleasure from my corpse and be damned to you!"

  A swift look round showed Lythande that nothing human was alive within hearing. It was nowhere within the bounds of possibility that this woman could live and betray her. Lythande knelt, crushing the woman's head gently against her breast.

  "Hush, hush, my sister. I will not harm you."

  The woman looked up at her in wonder, and a smile spread over the dying face. She whispered, "I thought I had betrayed my last trust—I was sworn to die first; but there were too many for me. The Goddess does not forgive—those who submit—"

  She was slipping away. Lythande whispered, "Be at peace, child. The Goddess does not condemn. ..." And thought: / would not give a fart in sulphurous hell for a goddess who would.

  "My sword—" the woman groped; already she found it hard to see. Lythande put the hilt into her fingers.

  "My sword—dishonored—" she whispered. "I am Larith. The sword must go—back to her shrine. Take it. Swear—"

  Larithae! Lythande knew of the shrine of that hidden goddess and of the vow her women made. She could now understand, though never excuse, the thugs who had attacked and killed the woman. Larithae were f
air game everywhere from the Southern Waste to Falthot in the Ice Hills. The shrine of the Goddess as Larith lay at the end of the longest and most dangerous road in the Forbidden Country, and it was a road Lythande had no reason nor wish to tread. A road, moreover, that by her own oath she was forbidden, for she might never reveal herself as a woman, at the cost of the Power that had set the Blue Star between her brows. And only women sought, or could come to, the shrine of Larith.

  Firmly, denying, Lythande shook her head.

  "My poor girl, I cannot; I am sworn elsewhere, and serve not your Goddess. Let her sword remain honorably in your hand. No," she repeated, putting away the woman's pleading hand, "I cannot, Sister. Let me bind up your wounds, and you shall take that road yourself another day."

  She knew the woman was dying; but it would give her something, Lythande thought, to occupy her thoughts in death. And if, in secret and in her own heart, she cursed the impetus that had prompted her to ignore that old survival law of minding her own business, no hint of it came into the hard but compassionate face she bent on the dying swordswoman.

  The Laritha was silent, smiling faintly beneath Lythande's gentle ministrations; she let Lythande straighten her twisted limbs, try to stanch the blood that now had slowed to a trickle. But already her eyes were dulling and glazing. She caught at Lythande's fingers and whispered, in a voice so thready that only by Lythande's skill at magic could the words be distinguished, "Take the sword, Sister. Larith witness I give it to you freely without oath. ..."

  With a mental shrug, Lythande whispered, "So be it, without oath . . . bear witness for me in that dark country, Sister, and hold me free of it."

  Pain flitted over the dulled eyes for the last time.

  "Go free—if you can—" the woman whispered,, and with her last movement thrust the hilt of the larith sword into Lythande's palm. Lythande, startled, by pure reflex closed her hand on the hilt, then abruptly realized what she was doing—rumor had many tales of larith magic, and Lythande wanted none of their swords! She let it go and tried to push it back into the woman's hand. But the fingers had locked in death and would not receive it.

  Lythande sighed and laid the woman gently down. Now what was to be done? She had made it clear that she would not take the sword; one of the few things that was really known about the Larithae was that their shrine was a shrine of women swordpriestesses, and that no man might touch their magic, on pain of penalties too dreadful to be imagined. Lythande, Pilgrim Adept, who had paid more highly for the Blue Star than any other Adept in the history of the Order, dared not be found anywhere in the light of Keth or her sister Reth with a sword of Larith in her possession. For the very life of Lythande's magic depended on this: that she never be known as a woman.

  The doom had been just, of course. The shrine of the Blue Star had been forbidden to women for more centuries than can be counted upon the fingers of both hands. In all the history of the Pilgrim Adepts, no woman before Lythande had penetrated their secrets in disguise; and when at last she was exposed and discovered, she was so far into the secrets of the Order that she was covered by the dreadful oath that forbids one Pilgrim Adept to slay another—for all are sworn to fight, on the Last Day of All, for Law against Chaos. They could not kill her; and since already she bore all the secrets of their Order, she could not be bidden to depart.

  But the doom laid on her had been what she had, unknowing, chosen when she came into the Temple of the Blue Star under concealment.

  "As you have chosen to conceal your womanhood, so shall you forever conceal it," thus had fallen the doom, "for on that secret shall hang your power; on the day that any other Adept of the Blue Star shall proclaim forth your true sex, on that day is your power fallen, and ended with it the sanctity that protects you against vengeance upon one who stole our secrets. Be, then, what you have chosen to be, and be so throughout the eternity until the Last Battle of Law against Chaos."

  And so, fenced about with all the other vows of a Pilgrim Adept, Lythande bore that doom of eternal concealment. Never might she reveal herself to any man; nor to any woman save one she could trust with power and life. Only three times had she dared confide in any, and of those three, two were dead. One had died by torture when a rival Adept of the Blue Star had sought to wring Lythande's secret from her; had died still faithful. And the other had died in her arms, minutes ago. Lythande smothered a curse; her weak admission to a dying woman might have saddled her with a curse, even though she had sworn nothing. If she were seen with a larith sword, she might as well proclaim her true sex aloud from the High Temple steps at midday in Old Gandrinl

  Well, she would not be seen with it. The sword should lie in the grave of the Laritha who had honorably defended it.

  Lythande stood up, drawing down the hood of the mage-robe over her face so that the Blue Star was in shadow. Nothing about her—tall, lean, angular— betrayed that she was other than any Pilgrim Adept; her smooth, hairless face might have been the hairless-ness of a freak or an effeminate had there been any to question it—which there was not—and the pale hair, square-cut after an ancient fashion, the narrow hawk-features, were strong and sexless, the jawline too hard for most women. Never, for an instant, by action, word, mannerism, or inattention, had she ever betrayed that she was other than magician, mercenary. Under the mage-robe was the ordinary dress of a north-countryman— leather breeches; high, laceless boots; sleeveless leather jerkin—and the laced and ruffled under-tunic of a dandy. The ringless hands were calloused and square, ready to either of the swords that were girded at the narrow waist; the right-hand blade for material enemies, the left-hand blade against things of magic.

  Lythande picked up the larith blade and held it distastefully at arm's length. Somehow she must see to having the woman buried, and the heap of corpses they had made between them. By fantastic luck, no one had entered the street till now, but a drunken snatch of song raised raucous echoes between the old buildings, and a drunken man reeled down the street, with two or three companions to hold him upright, and seeing Lythande standing over the heap of bodies, got the obvious impression.

  "Murder!" he howled. "Here's murder and death! Ho, the watch, the guards—help, murder!"

  "Stop howling," Lythande said, "the victim is dead, and all the rest of her assailants fled."

  The man came to stare drunkenly down at the body.

  "Pretty one, too," said the first man. "Did you get your turn before she died?"

  "She was too far gone," Lythande said truthfully. "But she is a countrywoman of mine, and I promised her I would see her decently buried." A hand went into the mage-robe and came out with a glint of gold. "Where do I arrange for it?"

  "I hear the watchmen," said one man, less drunk than his companions, and Lythande, too, could hear the ringing of boots on stone, the clash of pikes. "For that kind of gold, you could have half the city buried, and if there weren't enough corpses, I'd make you a few more myself."

  Lythande flung the drunk some coins. "Get her buried, then, and that carrion with her."

  "I'll see to it," said the least drunk, "and not even toss you a coin for that fine sword of hers; you can take it to her kinfolk."

  Lythande stared at the sword in her hand. She would have sworn she had laid it properly across the dead woman's breast. Well, it had been a confusing half hour. She bent and laid it on the lifeless breast. "Touch it not; it is a larith sword; I dare not think what the Larithae would do to you, should they find you with that in your hand."

  The drunken men shrank back. "May I defile virgin goats if I touch it," said one of them, with a superstitious gesture. "But do you not fear the curse?"

  And now she was confused enough that she had picked up the larith blade again. This time she put it carefully down across the Laritha's body and spoke the words of an unbinding-spell in case the dying woman's gesture had somehow sought to bind that sword to her. Then she moved into the shadows of the street in that noiseless and unseen way that often caused people to swear, truthfully
, that they had seen Lythande appearing or disappearing into thin air. She looked on from the shadows until the watchmen had come, cursing, and dragged away the bodies for burial. In this city, they knew little of the Goddess Larith and her worship, and Lythande thought, conscience-stricken, that she should have seen to it that the woman and her ravishers were not buried in the same grave. Well, and what if they were? They were all dead, and might await the Last Battle against Chaos together; they could have no further care for what befell their corpses, or if they did, they could tell it to whatever judges awaited them on the far side of death's gate.

  This story is not concerned with the business that had brought Lythande to Old Gandrin, but when it was completed the next day, and the mercenary-magician emerged from a certain house in the Merchants' Quarter, stowing more coins into the convenient folds of the mage-robe, and ruefully remembering the depleted stocks of magical herbs and stones in the pouches and pockets stowed in odd places about that mage-robe, Lythande, with a most unpleasant start, found her fingers entangled with a strange object of metal tied about her waist. It was the larith sword; and it was, moreover, tied there with a strange knot that gave her fingers some little trouble to untie, and was certainly not her own work!

  "Chaos and hellfire!" swore Lythande. "There is more to larith magic than I ever thought!"

  That damnable impulse that had prompted her to meddle in somebody else's business had now, it seemed, saddled her with someone else's magic. Furthermore, her unbinding-spell had not worked. Now she must make strong magic that would not fail; and first she must find herself a safe place to do it.

  In Old Gandrin she had no safe-house established, and the business that had brought her here, though important and well paid, was not of the kind that makes many friends or incurs much gratitude. She had been gifted past what she had asked for her services; but should Lythande present herself at that same door where she had worked spells to thrust out ghosts and haunts, she did not deceive herself that she would receive much welcome. What, then, to do? A Pilgrim Adept did not make magic in the street like a wandering juggler!